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Killing off predators has a cascading effect that comes back to bite you in the ass. They killed off all the natural predators of deer in Indiana and now, not only are there deer everywhere (people in Bloomington have to fence in their gardens because of an urban deer problem), if enough of them aren’t culled by hunters every year, they eat up all the food and not only do a bunch of deer starve to death, but so do all the other animals that they share that food with.
But talk about re-introducing wolves and bears and cougars to Indiana and people think they’ll be murdered in their beds… as if there are constant maulings in the parts of the U.S. with those animals. You’re more likely to be killed by a deer running in front of your car in Bloomington in the middle of the day. Which sure as hell almost happened to me once.
Hunters are a big lobby here. They don’t want competition by predators. As long as there’s no natural balance, they can tell everyone their hobby is essential work for the preservation of nature. An actually sustainable solution is against their interests.
The big problem with hunters “managing” wildlife is that they go out and shoot the big strong healthy ones, and not the small weak sickly ones. Overall it weakens the population.
I mean we also don’t want all the Chad super strong genetic freak deer running around. So maybe that’s ok?
Hunting is huge in Indiana (we’re full of Republican rednecks after all), but even hunters have come to admit there’s just not enough of them and too many deer at this point. They’re the first ones seeing the effects.
As it is, I support them because it’s them- and they generally eat what they hunt- or the Indiana Department of Natural Resources sends people out with rifles and puts the carcasses in a big pile and sets fire to it or whatever wasteful thing they would do.
AFAIK the policy shift has more to do with wolf population increasing and now getting into more inhabited areas and killing domesticated animals. The rural/farming community has previously been pretty split on the issue, since they are quite often engaged in nature preservation & wildlife issues aside from hunting. However, these incidents have polarized the public against wolves.
For context, wolves were extinct in southern Sweden for roughly a century (since the early 1900s), and in northern Sweden for several decades before being artificially reintroduced there during the 1970s and slowly spreading southwards.
Bloodthirsty nuts want a license to be able to shoot and kill things legally, to the surprise of no one
That is way over my ability to understand, but I will take your word for it.
less prey means predators have less food, so they don’t reproduce as much or die of hunger, this decreases predator population, this means prey has better conditions to reproduce, this means that prey population grows, this means that predators now have more prey available, this means that predator population grows, which limits prey population. it’s a cycle, it’s pretty long, and nobody remembers that’s how it rolls before it completes. it’s not very regular, but sensitive to random inputs
Wolf haters are idiots that don’t understand nature for shit.
Money stopped caring about Nature a long time ago.
Here is your reminder that wolves are good for rivers.
TL;DW it’s similar to what I was saying above- the deer in Yellowstone were eating all the grass because there were no wolves. They reintroduced the wolves and the deer started avoiding areas where the wolves were most likely to catch them. Much like the negative cascading effect I was talking about in Indiana, this had a positive cascading effect which greatly increased the biodiversity of the entire region and even had effect on rivers due to less soil erosion.
New England has so many freaking deer because of the complete lack of natural predators. The native mountain lion species here went extinct a long time ago, and nothing has taken its place.
It’s literally just hunters and cars hitting them keeping the population in check.
Plus there’s that deer wasting disease that’s been spreading, and continued overpopulation is just gonna make it worse.
Keeping predators in an eco system is so fucking important.
I don’t think it’s this bad right now, but I remember about 10 years ago a hunter telling me about the starving deer he was bagging because of a population explosion.
If they need to keep wolves away from certain places they should do the same Greenland does with polar bears: Catch them, put them in prison with shoddy (but edible) food for a couple of weeks, then release them away from civilisation. Bear parents then even go ahead and teach their kids to not get too close to human settlements, wolves should be more than intelligent enough to do the same.
Wait what? That’s hilarious. They traumatize the bears so the bears go home and frighten their kids with peison stories? They implemented a “scared straight” program for bears? Amazing.
Wolf population in Spain is now around 3000, and is considered dangerously low for genetic diversity. What are the Swedes thinking?
Tell me about it! In Switzerland they voted to reintroduce the wolf in the country a few years back and this year they voted to shoot an entire pack… Humans, maaaan! SMH.
When did that happen? I only remember that we declined the hunting law revision but never approved anything regarding reintriducing wolfs.
Bah would you look at that, I thought we did. You are correct, the wolf came back on its own and was not artificially re-introduced. So a pack can be killed if it caused too much damages.
the swedish wolves were already hunted to the point of inbreeding before regulations were created.
The conservative government in power loves short sighted solutions
In several places that reintroduced wolves, government also pledged to compensate farmers for cattle killed by wolves, reducing the objections farmers had to intentionally increasing the wolf population. Perhaps a similar program would be appropriate here?
I wonder if studies are performed before decisions like these are made. Just look at what happened in the four pests campaign in China, before doing any killing studies have to be conducted to see the affect on the ecosystem.
The numbers doesn’t match other sources. I would take this with a pinch of salt.
Can you link some? I tried looking at mainstream Swedish news sources and they have matching numbers. E.g: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/orebro/kritik-mot-licensjakten-pa-varg
Interesting, when looking around there is tons of sources showing different numbers all over the place. I settled for another SVT article https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/vargen-i-sverige-2024/
The issue is so polarizing I bet tons of groups want to push a narrative.
Thanks. It’s the same in Norway: Wolves are hunted to technically-barely-not-extinction by some sources, and culled to “good for the wolves” numbers by other sources. Frustrating.
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Swedimwits
