7 ms·

Why should we even pay? There's no constitutional right to be able to leave your livestock basically unprotected on vast tracts of land where they're vulnerable

• MikeKusold 6y ago
  Because the alternative is to say that ranchers need to protect their livestock from wildlife, and then wolves end up back on the ESL.
• nickff 6y ago
  Well, my understanding is that there is no covenant on that land which protects the wolves, so the farmers have some right to shoot them. The states technically own all wildlife within their respective borders, but they’re reluctant to exercise that right against a large and influential lobby. It may also be that harm caused by a re-introduced species is a taking.
• monkeybutton 6y ago
  If it's such a rare occurrence, is there an opportunity for insurance companies to provide solutions instead of the government?
  • allannienhuis 6y ago
    I don't think so - because the ranchers would still bear all of the costs of the problem of having wolves exist. Insurance doesn't transfer costs to the whole group that benefits from the existence of wolves. Having the costs come from the public purse seems like a good way to do that fairly. Although in the case of wolves, it seems like politics seem to play as much or more of a role than fairness.
    • pvaldes 6y ago
      Farmers receive huge services from wolves, maybe they should pay for them also. Wolves remove wild grazers increasing the amount of pasture available for cattle. Wolves clean scabies in deer, lyme disease, and bovine tuberculosis in wild boars that would otherwise end in the cattle or the farmer. Wolves reduce the coyotes population. Reduce the car accidents against deer crossing the road. Wolves protect trees and allow forests to grow. Without mention that wolves provide huge and easily measurable economical benefits to tourism.
      • spiderfarmer 6y ago
        There's absolutely no evidence for any of the claims you're making.
        • pvaldes 6y ago
          > There's absolutely no evidence Maybe you didn't search enough https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/doSearch?AllField=Canis+lupus&SeriesKey=19399170 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/doSearch?...
      • allannienhuis 6y ago
        If the money comes from the public purse, they are paying for them also... Seems fair to me.
  • Chris2048 6y ago
    Who pays the premiums?
• Fezzik 6y ago
  We should pay... the price of cows killed by wolves should be priced in to the sales price of beef, which is way too cheap right now as it is. This is a super simple calculation.
  • mynegation 6y ago
    Where is the averaging component in that? If some ranchers affected more by wolves and raise their prices accordingly, they become less competitive.
    • gbrown 6y ago
      That's rather the point of a market economy, and this is a small example of the problems with one: it's difficult to face up to powerful industries to force them to price in externalities.
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    Not if the wolves are reintroduced and protected by the government.
• protomyth 6y ago
  Why should we even pay? There's no constitutional right to be able to leave your livestock basically unprotected on vast tracts of land where they're vulnerable to predators. The argument would go: the government does not want the rancher to actually protect his cattle because that would involve shooting the wolves. That's why the wolves on the list in the first place. If don't want cattle put in a barn all day, then you get cattle out in the fields.
  • gbrown 6y ago
    That argument presupposes the right of the farmer to do whatever they want to protect their cattle, which was what I was objecting too.
    • Filligree 6y ago
      This ends with "Let's not have ranchers", which is an outcome I'd agree with.
      • spiderfarmer 6y ago
        I absolutely don't agree with you. But you're one the few who's honest about his endgame. I see all jabs against farmers in this light though. And they do too.
      • gbrown 6y ago
        I don’t think that’s true, but ranching would need to get more labor intensive or technology intensive. This is just another externality the industry isn’t currently paying for.
• ahoy 6y ago
  Reintroduction and protection of large predators has diffuse benefits and concentrated damages. It affects the average rancher orders of magnitude more (and importantly, more negatively) than it affects the average non-rancher. So you have a group with common interests who are ready to act as an obstruction to the greater social good because it's going to financially harm them. You _can_ tell them to shove it, but that has political consequences and might backfire and undo your whole conservation effort. Or you can help them out financially while they transition to doing business in this new normal where wolves still get to exist.
  • gbrown 6y ago
    Yeah, I get the practical argument, but as you say the big picture looks very different.
  • aejnsn 6y ago
    I don't know if I agree with the first bit. Wolves were reintroduced to my original part of the US to much benefit, not just the conservation of the species. Stupid whitetail deer were running wild, destroying flora and destroying too many cars on the region's highways. Departments of game and wildlife tried to address this by issuing more hunting permits for whitetail. Didn't work. There are only so many hunters, and they hunt all they can. More permits doesn't do anything for them when the population is booming. They're not hunting anything that exists, they're looking for trophies at this point, and taking the best of the gene pool. A group of vehicle insurance companies were organizing events, leasing hunting land, and paying bounties in a couple counties due to the rampant whitetail population. Wolves were reintroduced there to much benefit making for a healthy population of whitetail. Also, because the whitetail overpopulation has been curtailed, game law violations dropped in that rural part of the world. It takes a dedicated hunter to actually 'hunt', but attracts any idiot with a rifle when game in an area is rampantly overpopulated.
• yupyup54133 6y ago
  Unless you are for the reintroduction of wolves where you live your opinion on this is selfish. Too many wealthy urbanites and subutbanites have a not-in-my-backyard mentality about wolves.
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    When I spent time in DC, I never noticed any predators on K street or any of the locations further afield in the NW quadrant where wildlife lobbyists operated. However, wouldn't doubt that they would be the first people to dial if there were a threatening animal anywhere near them. "Leopard suspected of eating 15 people in Nepal" https://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/nepal-leopard-deaths/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/nepal-leopard-...
  • gbrown 6y ago
    I live in a rural area with lots of coyotes, and I'd welcome a return of wolves to deal with the over-abundance of deer.
    • pvaldes 6y ago
      Plus the benefit of deterring coyotes from the area
• jacurtis 6y ago
  The argument is that farmers (or anyone else) actually do have a right to protect/defend their property (livestock are property). So when the government says that you can't protect your property if the thing killing it is a wolf, then farmers get very frustrated because they feel like their freedom/rights have been controlled or taken away from the government. To put the farmer's perspective another way: Everyone has a right to self-defense if you are being harmed. But imagine if the government says "actually, if the person harming you has blonde hair, then you can't defend yourself because we are protecting people with blonde hair right now. But don't worry we will make it worth your while if you just let the blonde person hurt you." I know this sounds like a crazy example, but if you have ever spent time around farmers who deal with this issue, it feels exactly as crazy to them.
  • wbl 6y ago
    That's what fences are for
    • gambiting 6y ago
      I think you absolutely, grossly underestimate what kinds of areas we're talking about. Not to mention that fences then stop movement of other animals(also including wolves) which has massive impacts on ecosystems. Also, if you ever had a dog, you know that no kind of fence will stop a sufficiently determined dog unless you make it out of solid metal and 10ft tall(and even then my dog would just dig under it, so be prepared to have to bury it few feet under the ground too).
    • rtkwe 6y ago
      Large fences big enough to keep wolves out have a lot of other knock on effects and are very expensive. Barbed wire is extremely cheap and is enough to generally contain grazing livestock contained but a lot of wildlife can freely move around them meaning their habitat doesn't get cut up and cut off from itself. A tall fence buried deep enough to keep wolves from digging under would be very expensive.
      • spiderfarmer 6y ago
• cal5k 6y ago
  First, they're not farmers. They're ranchers. Second, it hardly "destroys the environment for their convenience". Where I live the cattle graze down the grasses and prevent fires from spreading. In return, they leave manure which is super useful as a natural fertilizer for gardens and such. Third, ranching is about food security. The areas where cattle are grazed are typically not much good for food crops, and it's a far more humane way to keep cattle. They got to roam around some pretty vast tracts of land, and you have a really healthy source of locally-sourced protein. Finally, cattle are property. The idea that you shouldn't be allowed to protect your property is nutty. There are plenty of other wild animals for wolves to prey on, and there's no good ecosystem argument for why they should be permitted to slaughter cattle willy-nilly. Allowing ranchers to shoot wolves threatening their cattle would result in surviving wolves being much more reticent about going after cattle in the first place. See: why bears and cougars rarely attack humans, even though their populations are healthy enough to be on the "hunt all year round" list for property owners in many areas.
• spiderfarmer 6y ago
  Just say you hate farmers man, I mean it's very obvious.
• pvaldes 6y ago
  Wolves are definitely NOT a big problem for bovine cattle. Cows with calfs can join together and be defensive and pretty letal also if upset. If there is a bull protecting the whole herd wolves had nothing to do. Wolves are a problem for sheep and goats, but will be need to be really desperate for attacking a group of healthy cows. The races of cows able to pass months alone in the mountain are perfectly able to hold their ground against a wolf.
• pvaldes 6y ago
  Exact. Everybody is being taxed to cover the loses of a private company with a lousy management. People that claims to lose 600 sheep, year after year, (this guys have really bad, bad luck) are receiving 24.000 euros/year for the privilege of doing -nothing- to protect their assets. Why? Is the meat free? Is: "pay me a ransom of 2 million euro each year... or I could start killing a protected species... or burning the forest, or burning your house, maybe your family also". Everybody giving money to a few people so they agree to respect the law is an interesting concept for sure. Is plain mobster blackmail. Each country that tried to appease criminals with money has deeply regretted it in the end. We don't cover hotels by their loses when jellyfishes appear in a beach. Should we?