Forums » Smalltalk » Norway is going to kill off 70% of it's wolf pop!

Article here

Apparently they can justify killing off nearly 70% of the wolf population because wolves are responsible for an estimated .31% to 1.5% of the yearly sheep loss.

There are just no words to describe how angry, sad and disappointed I am about this.

America tried this once. Now we're spending lots of time and money to bring them back after realizing our mistake. Wolves are a critical part of the ecosystem. They keep other wildlife in check, and without them the plant life severely suffers due to herbivore booms due to lack of predators.

There is literally not a single thing wrong with this. I'd even go as far as to say that it doesn't need to be "justified". People seem to have this warm perspective of wolves seeing them as the "good" guys because quite truthfully, wolves have no impact on your day to day life.
In the sense of a farmer however, and you do need to remember that farmers are struggling more and more every year to produce the bare necessities that we as sheltered individuals use. I could go into thorough detail about how badly farmers suffer from dealing with extremely cold areas in the winter to struggling to get by with the food their creatures produce. Now to be a farmer and have your sheep constantly being slaughtered by wolves just takes the cake. Sheep nowadays are primarily the highest source of income for farmers, more so if you're a small farmer with very little at your disposal. To have those things constantly being killed by feral wolves then have no repercussions is absolutely cruel. Anthropomorphism doesn't work at all. As Ben Shapiro said quite clearly "Facts don't care about your feelings." I'd much rather be happy knowing that the little farmer who produces the milk I drink has more to survive on due to wolves being killed as opposed to wolves killing his stock and escaping freely.

And how much of the wolves would need to die, all of them? Or just those around farmer territory, why not relocation? Wolves actually play a part in less than 2% of the loss, did you look at what is the other 98%? Wolves are animals and humans invade their territory, not the other way around. Without wolves you will find that grasslands and other plant based areas suffer, 70% is a high number, does 30% equal a high enough amount to police the feral animals wolves usually do?

Farmers who don't watch their herds and don't learn are a bit of the problem. Wolves only go for what is the easiest prey they can get, if those sheep are easier than the prey in their normal hunting area then the farmers aren't properly protecting their livestock.

I'm not too sure where the two percent is coming from because I can guarantee you that the percentage of wolf attacks on cattle is most certainly higher than two percent so we can assume that you're referring to the article. If so, it doesn't justify the situation any better. The statement about wolves not invading territories is folly and I'm quite sure you know it. There are farmers in France who have had their farms in the same location for many years yet are now facing the pain of wolf attacks. The funny thing about this is that there have been several cases of wolves going out of their way to hurt and harm farmers and their stock - Link.
These percentages don't really mean much unless you link or reference a piece of solid information that support them. I also don't believe that without wolves grasslands would suffer. The UK is widely known for its grass lands yet their numbers of wolves are low if there at all.

But your solution to all this is to have the farmers relocate? I really feel like you're underestimating the work they do. A decent farm can have up to 50 - 100 sheep. That's just in sheep alone, discounting the other animals they have. Watching those animals are usually a maximum of 10 people.
Your response is that those 10 not being able to watch 50+ sheep and cattle are the problem?
Wolves are native hunters, it doesn't matter what the farmer does, If they set their minds to killing cattle, that's what they will do and the farmers can't do a single thing about it due to people rushing into the defence of the wolves.
Until we find a way to smoothly relocate all of them, killing them simply would be the most effective solution.
Im simply rating the value of human life over that of an animal. Farmers nowadays struggle greatly against modern creations, many resort to suicide after failure in their sales. It's disgusting to think that people would prefer the wolves to continue killing cattle if it means they live.

If you have free-grazing flocks that have no fixed point, then you will be competing with the rest of the wild life that the wolves stop pushing back. If you have a fixed point, consider a fence. All the ranches here in Texas have barb wire fences.

To say that the endangerment of wolthey "have no impact on your day to day lives" is a fallacy. Even predators are important to the food chain, and the overall ecosystem. Wolves slightly curb the populations of animals like deer, who will over-graze the land of not kept in check. This over grazing can actually damage rivers, as we saw in Yellowstone National Park. This would also put farmers in competition with other wild life in order to feed their animals. Should we then kill 70+% of the deer too? Then what animal after that?

When permitted to kill more wolves, how many do you believe will truly care if the population drops below 25-30%? In the end, you would find that all those wolves had a much larger impact larger impact than the very few subsidized sheep killed by them.


http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-wolves-can-save-ecosystem/

Again, you're ignoring and diminishing the perspective of the farmers. These people come in all shapes and sizes but like I said before, it's extremely difficult to be a farmer nowadays. Buying your own cattle can be incredibly frustrating and then suddenly you see that they are being killed like nothing. It doesn't matter whether the numbers or statistics are low, this is still a problem - clearly a very big problem otherwise Norway wouldn't be planning to kill that many despite the various disagreements.
You can talk about saving the ecosystem all you want but if farmers are struggling to put food on the table because of this, I'd say that the ecosystem means nothing.

If you say that the ecosystem means nothing you are way out of line. I care about farmers and all they do for everyone. I think it is extremely important to keep them happy, but we are not on this earth to own it and to abuse it and think of it as nothing. It is the lone thing that has sustained us. The earth is alive and we are killing not because of you. Everything worked out just fine before we came along to take advantage of everything it has to offer. I'm not saying it's easy to be a farmer-it's not- but even farmers care about the ecosystems and the land they are working.

If the farmers didn't have the proper set up to begin with they shouldn't have started in on it, or built the fences to be able to protect their livestock... Wolves have a place in the food chain, if your farmers aren't keeping a control on their flock, which is what I meant by keeping a watch on them not killing or running off wolves, then the wolves will kill their livestock. You can't blame an animal for being an animal... Wolves have this thing called instinct, they can tell what the easiest prey is going to be and if that prey happens to be the flock/herd that isn't in a set area cause their farmer isn't going to put up fences then they will kill it. We Americans killed off more wolves than we needed to. Norway may do the same and then find out that their deer end up in a pop boom and then they'll encroach on the farmer land, you'll run into a problem of the sheep and cattle not being able to get enough food off of grazing, which can also be a problem.

Edit: Wolves were there before they ever set foot there, they just avoided out of easier prey being available. Now since their herds are easier to get than their normal prey they are hunting the herds of farmers so no farmers aren't the original owners.

I am not ignoring their perspective. I believe they need help, too, but I also see the bigger picture. You say that the link Katia provided had skewed stats, but so does the one you shared. 10,000 attacks in France since the middle ages? That is under 10 attacks a year. Under 5 attacks a year from healthy wolves. In modern days, it is rare for someone to be attacked by wolves, as your article pointed out. The safety of farmers to justify the slaughtering of an eco-system corner stone is ridiculous in this light. Not to mention, Norwegian flocks are usually left unguarded.

Fewer than fifty wolves live in Norway, which means there are fewer than one wolf per 3,000 miles (4828.032 km). Wolves account for about 41 killed sheep per year in Norway. I can't find the price of sheep in Norway, so I'll use the one of the types from the US. A lamb in the US is worth about $250. This means about $10,250 dollars are collectively lost per year in Norway. The cost of of reintroducing wolves is high, as they will most likely need to be reintroduced (they were once hunted to extinction in France, too). Between the importance of ecotourism in Norway, and how cheap the compiled loss is compared to the potential loss of tourism and the cost of reintroducing them, to say that they need to be killed because of a few dead sheep is to ignore the rest of Norway's economy.

Nearly twelve thousand hunters have signed up to hunt 16/30 wolves. When you have about 750 people hunting per wolf meant to be killed, the chances of over hunting are increasingly high.

Let's look at the pros and cons of killing these wolves so far.
Pros
-Potential decrease in the collective $10k loss
-Near negligable increase of farmer safety (who are at more risk from their equipment than wolves)
Cons
-Risk of over-hunting wolves
-Damage to eco system
-Potential for farmers to compete for grazing land with other wildlife
-High cost to reintroduce wolves
-Change in sheep killed would proportionately be only 27 sheep per year
-Potential drop in tourism
-Damage to the 'green' status of the country
-Damage public opinion of the country

This isn't the ramblings of some random tree hugger. These are facts. I concern myself with the economy as much as the environment, there needs to be a balance. The needs of nature and man are both of great importance. But you can't not think about the possible consequences. You may not care about the ecosystem, which makes the world we live in, but some do. We don't own this world, we borrow it from our grandchildren. It is not disgusting that someone values the lives of an important creature. Despite your feelings, the facts are here. As Ben Shapiro said quite clearly "Facts don't care about your feelings."

You are right, wolves are such a menace, after we are done massacring the wolves, let's move onto bees. After all bees kill nearly 100 people in just the US alone! Link

Screw the damage to the ecosystem that the loss of bees would cause, after all the ecosystem means nothing!

Lastly while don't we kill all the deer next as deer killed 200 people in the US alone! Link

All I'm going to say is that hopefully they'll keep the prey animals in check too if they lessen the amount of wolves that hunt them

Like gamers said, wolves were completely exterminated in France and, frankly, nobody here cares about it, except the extremist ecologists that want humanity to go back to the stone age.
Seriously though, I don't think it'll make much of an impact either way, the number of wolves is insignificant, it's only important for tourism.

Er, you have wolves in France now. About 50. If you'll click the numerous links above, you'll see we covered why the wolves were important to more than just tourism.

If those facts aren't enough, wolves are also an indicator species. This makes them important for the same reason frogs are, they show the condition of the environment around them.

It doesn't take an environmental extremist to care about the world around 'em, it just takes someone with heart and brain to know we need it and care about it. There is nothing extreme about caring about wolf populations given how important they are. What is extreme would be a psychotic genocide of them.

That to me seems like a perspective taken from a vast distance. We are not on the earth to own it? States who? You? The defining features of owning something comes under the idea that you have full control of the said item. We decide whether the animals live or die, we decide whether they have a safe place to live. The reason there are safe havens for creatures in the world is because we decide to leave them be. Not the other way around. Nature only exists and flourishes currently because we allow it to which renders your point about humans not owning the earth to be pretty empty to be fair.

This whole post is just beyond ridiculous. You're effectively saying that if the farmers aren't able to protect all their cattle at once, they should give up and do something else because wolves will be wolves and continue to kill sheep because it's easy to access?

Do you realise that the choice that Norway has taken isn't something they just decided to do overnight? It reached this point because the number of deaths was getting too high. I said before, people try to lower the matter down to statistics saying that because wolves are the cause of less than 2% of cattle death, it means nothing.
You do realise that the number doesn't validate the actual kills done by wolves?
Even then, what difference would a percentage make? These are stock belonging to farmers that they use to produce their wealth to ensure survival. Any number lost is tragic.
If you read a news report that stated that wolves were the cause of less than two percent of children's deaths in a general area, does that suddenly make the deaths justifiable?
I mean, if the parents couldn't protect their children, they shouldn't have had kids in the first place right? Animals will be animals yes?

There's far too much emotion and uncessary emphasis in that post.

Did you actually read the links you posted? They go completely against what you're trying to suggest. The first link was stating that the deaths attached to the bees aren't even caused by Bees in the first place. It was saying that the stings usually become catalysts for other sicknesses such as allergies, heart attacks etc, which are the true cause of the deaths. Not the Bees themselves. Heck, they even go as far as to give you a comparison stating that a five year old girl could be stung three times and not get permanent damage.
Should have probably read the article first Katia.

Your second link was even worse, it literally is just eight lines before jumping to something else, I had to do my own research and I found that not only are the deaths exaggerated but like the Bees, the deaths aren't actually caused by the coconuts themselves but other issues not even related. [url= ghttp://travelwireasia.com/2016/01/do-falling-coconuts-really-kill-150-people-each-year/]Link[/url]

Oh my word, your last link is the worst of all of them. On the very first sentence it states that deers lead to the causes of deaths, not the actual deaths themselves.
Are you purposely trying to spread misinformation to get people to be more sympathetic towards that ideology? In your post this is what you say:

"Deer killed 200 people in the US alone! "

However, this is what the article says:
"The van was then hit by a semitrailer going about 65 mph."

Ultimately, that could have been avoided if the family had drove on and killed the deer for being on the road as people do in other countries. However due to that country being the U.S, if the man had killed the Deer, he'd be facing some charges and because of that, lives were lost.

I'd actually like to know who you think is to blame in that scenario? That's a serious question to anyone else in this thread. Who was in the wrong? The Deer? The driver?

What I'm saying is they take some of their wealth and ensure that their flock is protected instead of LETTING THEM ROAM! Which is what has been known to happen. We've said that adequate protection of flocks/herds is the answer not killing off a rather important type of animal. And what I'm saying is put aside SOME of their money towards fencing, not starve themselves.

I'm just going to be really simple here. Humans are apart of the ecosystem. Humans are abusing their intelligence and are killing the ecosystem thus killing Other humans and the only place we have to live at this point in time. There are ways to all live on this earth and not kill off a bunch of animals and plants. But many humans think they are better then everything else on this earth. I am not one of them. Everything is linked together. Kill one piece and everything is messed up. Which is why humans had to put in place laws so other humans wouldn't kill everything.

But... But... killing animals helps them! It's common knowledge because Adam Conover and Judithea said so! Animal haters who support the mass killing of animals make me despise my species.

...Last I checked, people wanted to drive wolves to extinction here.

Yes and if the sting brings on Anaphylactic Shock or a heart attack, then it was still ultimately the bee sting that killed them. After all, if they hadn't be stung, then they wouldn't have had that reaction no? Also some people, I don't know the statistics have been killed by africanized bees thanks to the sheer number of stings.

I will concede the coconut trees and thus deleted it from my post. I actually checked several sites that said 150 people died from coconuts before I posted it.

As for the deer, you must not have read more then the first few sentences because farther down it says and I quote.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 1 million car accidents with deer each year that kill 200 Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in $1 billion in vehicle damage.

Hell my own father had a deer collusion when a deer jumped in front of his car in the middle of the night. Luckily he wasn't hurt, but the car was badly damaged.

Now we're talking, that sounds like a reasonable plan.

Yeah pretty much, I agree with this.

Nobody here hates animals.. the entire discussion is ultimately about the importance of animal lives over human lives which, if you had read through the thread, you would see that animals hold a greater importance. Let's let the wolves kill all the cattle and put poor farmers out of the job. How dare hardworking farmers try to let their cattle roam free in their open fields!