Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.
A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.
Most of these studies are done by politically motivated people with zero connection to the real world. I have permanent electric fences all over my property and wolves and coyotes and deer easily jump over them. Unless a farmer is willing to spend so much money he goes bankrupt on a 10' fence with tons of welded wire, the wolves come through.
Well, even more recent reports from Germany also claim that wolves are damn clever to cope even with e-fences. Unfortunately, the question of wild wolves roaming the country now has become a cultural war issue where you can easily guess the left/right divide.
For our ecosystem, a well-managed wolf population is probably a good thing, but rationality is about to go out the window over here. Of course, wolves do not slaughter herds out of pure fun, but also true is that the can wreak quite a bit of economic damage if they break into a holding pen.
> need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits
A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers financial benefits.
One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might with an appeal to ecological reasons.
Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample and eat everything they find because there is no natural control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin out their numbers.
>>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?
Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?
>> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains. Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.
>>They will kill a dozen cows in a day in a pen and not eat any of it.
To be honest with you - I don't even know where I'd begin to look for stats like these - have you got any links I could read?
I was only really able to ask Gemini about it which seems to confirm that wolves generally don't kill animals for any reason other than sustenance but obviously LLM so I accept it might be fully wrong - https://g.co/gemini/share/e1ce79cd97de
Not in the USA. There a variety of random government programs that give money in ways that do not make sense. It would be better to have zero government support and have the market naturally raise prices up a bit to cover things directly. Right now, government programs are set up to take care of a variety of special interests, most of which are silly and don't really help farmers and are very wasteful. I had four government people visit my farm for several hours recently and spend several weeks writing papers, all for a possible $25k well grant. The admin costs far surpass that, and most of the farmers using these programs don't really want what they are getting that much.
farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.
A local small farmer nearly got bankrupted when mountain lions killed most of his alpaca herd along with a bunch of sheep and goats. The cats engaged in surplus killing and didn't bother eating most of their kills (the state thought perhaps a mother was teaching a cub hunting skills, but it's not like they got an interview with Mom).
Easy to talk smack until it happens to you or someone you know.
ranchers are not owed a predator free landscape. and creating one is definitely a poor environmental practice. betcha the next time they invest in donkeys and large guardian dogs like ranchers have for thousands of years.
Where are you based? I’ve never heard this particular whinging before, the wolf populations across most of North America have been completely obliterated.
