8 ms·

Reminds me of the conflict between German farmers and the Goverment over whether or not wolves should be a protected species. Plenty of city-dwellers support a

Reminds me of the conflict between German farmers and the Goverment over whether or not wolves should be a protected species. Plenty of city-dwellers support all forms of biodiversity, as long as somebody else has to deal with the mess.

vanderZwan 5y ago
Meanwhile, every Italian I know laughs at how Northern Europeans react to wolves as if they're a big deal and something to be afraid of. They're not.
- fleddr 5y ago
  That's not really the problem, the problem is that they kill people's cattle and pets.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    Why the downvotes here? This is true. They are devastating. Obviously that doesn't matter to the urbanites whose livelihoods aren't put in danger.
    - eecc 5y ago
      - iqanq 5y ago
        nradov 5y ago
        In my neighborhood people keep complaining about coyotes killing their outdoor cats. The solution is simple: keep your cats indoors.
        UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        I don't see the coyote quote you're referring to, but coyotes are pretty adept at urban life. They even make it into NYC, weirdly. They like the rat and cat populations there and have been seen in Central Park with somewhat regularity. There's no need to fret about the population of coyotes. Fun fact, trying to cull coyotes can actually cause the population to boom. They're remarkably adaptable creatures and very smart, to boot. https://www.projectcoyote.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PC_SAB_Coyote-Facts_FINAL_2020_08.pdf https://www.projectcoyote.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PC_...
        pvaldes 5y ago
        > Unnecessary if we allow wolves to be hunted. So more people die in car crashes?. Good idea
        wwtrv 5y ago
        Wolves are very risk averse and generally only attack pets or livestock ( as long as they are not roaming alone in the mountains unprotected ) if they have no other choice (i.e. their natural habitat was destroyed). The last thing wolves want to do is to roam around the countryside looking for pets or cattle because that greatly increases their chance of encountering humans. And in any case most attacks on pets and humans are by wolf-dog hybrid which are much more aggressive (and less fearful of humans) than wolves.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        In the case of Northern Europe, in some countries the wolf was already extinct and is now making a sporadic return. Example: the Netherlands. This is a country almost entirely urbanized with hardly any wild habitat for the wolf to hunt in. So they do a lot of hunting in people's backyard. Killing sheep and dogs. They hunt frequently so damage is large. Even a single case is very impactful. I recently saw footage of 3 wolves tearing apart somebody's dog. To the owner, that is devastating. Next, this is spread on Facebook, and soon the town is outraged. Surely you understand this won't last very long, somebody is going to take care of that wolf if it happens a few more times. I love wolves, I want them to come back and want them to thrive. But at least for the Netherlands, it just doesn't work. We don't have the natural habitat.
      - dang 5y ago
        Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. The thread was noticeably degrading already, but your comment here was a big step in the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - ggm 5y ago
      Sensible rewilding schemes include compensation. I am not trying to minimise how hard this is, but there's an economic solution. Also, wild dogs probably cause as much damage as wolves do. Urbanites was a bit un-called for.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        Urbanite is a descriptive word, not a epithet. It's called for whenever city-dwellers are being described.
        pvaldes 5y ago
        Is always used as a deprecating term in this case. And insulting the same people that are taxed so the farmers can be heavily subsidized, is very unfair.
      - PicassoCTs 5y ago
        My brother got compensated, tractor sank into a beavers lodge, broke the axle, got 50 €. Was in the newspaper the day after that. Now that the beaver has destroyed the road foundation several times and the public had to pay for it, over and over, the mood of the sub-urban dwellers is slowly shifting. Turns out wildlife is not so cute, if you have to pay out of pocket for it.
        TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        It’s not about being cute. It’s about the biodiversity that reintroducing a lot of these predators creates. This is well-documented by the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the USA which occurred in the 1990s.
        ggm 5y ago
        Rewilded European beavers are responsible for significant improvement in water retention in upland areas reducing flooding, soil loss, and damage to crops. It's not about "cute" its about the long term qui bono. Maybe the road has to move. It's going to cost money to repair come what may, so maybe shifting it is the answer. I don't know, I just want to point out you're making huge assumptions about what the right answer IS, and also using "my specific therefore defines the general as wrong" arguments. Sure. Your brother had a bad beaver experience. European farmers who lost land to water runoff from bare hills are taking a different view.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      In Spain there is like a 3% of cattle affected by canine (wolf+dog) attacks, and those loses are covered by the government. We talk about animals that are basically left alone in the nature without protection for weeks and months. In many cases we talk about foals or old and sick cattle and often in a reduced group of farmers that claim to lose 600 animals year after year, but don't even buy a dog, that is a little suspicious if we think about it. So, maybe is not the bloodbath that many people assume
- bitwize 5y ago
  There're a fair number of Africans who laugh at how Europeans react to lions. Lions pose the same problems to Africans that wolves do to Europeans: they mainly take livestock and only rarely human life. In large part, any harm to humans caused by a lion is economic or secondary (e.g., starvation). In fact, lions know that if they eat a human, the human's tribe will hunt them down and retaliate (must've made for a very interesting day in Simba's circle-of-life training!), so only a sick or injured lion with few other choices for meat will attempt to eat a human. Now the hippopotamus... that is an animal widely feared in Africa. They may look fat and silly and eat plants, but they give no fucks, and will charge and trample you without a second thought.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    And the rhinoceros will charge and trample your campfire, famously.
    - stephenhuey 5y ago
      The Gods Must Be Crazy was a childhood favorite of mine, but that’s actually a myth: https://scoutlife.org/features/161345/7-animal-myths-that-everyone-thinks-are-true/ https://scoutlife.org/features/161345/7-animal-myths-that-ev... But definitely keep your distance from hippos, the most dangerous animal in Africa. They kill hundreds to thousands of people per year.
      - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
        Thousands is probably pushing it, they kill around ~500 a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...
        stephenhuey 5y ago
        I saw that, but many other places cite numbers such as 3,000. Having lived on that continent for many years, I’d expect many would go unreported in official tallies.
- tomcam 5y ago
  You definitely have more interesting conversations than I have. I have known many people from Poland, many people from China, many from Mexico, and many people from Japan. Yet I was never smart enough to survey them systematically about their reactions to another country’s views on wolves.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    All it takes is having lunch with fellow exchange students, or expat coworkers after graduating and deciding to stay in your country of study. Nothing complicated - although obviously not really a thing in the last few years. I live in Sweden. The topic of a wolf crossing borders with Norway where the conservation laws are different comes up every few years. The attitude of people in different countries to wolves (or any topic of the day really) gets discussed.
detaro 5y ago
That's a ... very simplified view on that topic.
andrepd 5y ago
> The country with the most extensive historical records is France, where nearly 7,600 fatal attacks were documented from 1200 to 1920.[1][2] There are few historical records or modern cases of wolf attacks in North America. In the half-century up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, three in North America, and more than 200 in south Asia.[3] Wolf attacks are a nearly irrelevant problem. Older generations are irrationally/disproportionately afraid of wolf attacks.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    > imagine you love animals so much you decide to dedicate your life to breeding sheeps ... Every morning you wake up to the mutilated corpses of your little sheeps. Nice melodrama. I will say it again knowing that people don't want the truth and is not ready for the truth: https://revistajaraysedal.es/wp-content/uploads/tres-perros-atacan-a-una-vaca_1-1024x576.jpg.webp https://revistajaraysedal.es/wp-content/uploads/tres-perros-... Most of this attacks are by dogs, not by wolves By feral or by domestic dogs. The only responsible of this attacks is the shepherd, that don't feed their dogs and allow them to roam free to attack the cattle of other people. This common offenders include the Patou also. And we all pay for their loses.
    - User23 5y ago
      It’s unsurprising that dog attacks outnumber wolf attacks after wolves have been exterminated. That doesn’t really tell us anything about the danger prevalent wolves would present.
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        5y ago
pvaldes 5y ago
Yeah, having biodiversity is a mess; there is water and food. And not having any is a Mars.
- mhitza 5y ago
  From the article it seems to have been extinct for around 400 years, and used in Roman arenas for their agresivity. Want to bring it back and keep it in an animal sanctuary? Sure. Free roaming herds in Europe? No thanks.
ScarletEmerald 5y ago
One sheep rancher I knew back in college was a huge fan of wolf reintroduction. According to him, the wolves killed a few sheep and almost all the coyotes, which meant he wasn't losing any sheep to coyotes. Which worked out to a major net decrease in "sheep lost to predators". That was twenty years ago, so maybe things have changed in intervening decades.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
homonculus1 5y ago
Just gotta remember the three S's
mytailorisrich 5y ago
In at least some countries in Europe where wolves or bears have been reintroduced there are compensation schemes for loss of cattle. This can actually lead to fraud: one of your sheep died in the mountain? Another victim of a wolf...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

vanderZwan 5y ago

Meanwhile, every Italian I know laughs at how Northern Europeans react to wolves as if they're a big deal and something to be afraid of. They're not.

fleddr 5y ago
That's not really the problem, the problem is that they kill people's cattle and pets.
- iqanq 5y ago
  Why the downvotes here? This is true. They are devastating. Obviously that doesn't matter to the urbanites whose livelihoods aren't put in danger.
  - eecc 5y ago
    - iqanq 5y ago
      - nradov 5y ago
        In my neighborhood people keep complaining about coyotes killing their outdoor cats. The solution is simple: keep your cats indoors.
        UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        I don't see the coyote quote you're referring to, but coyotes are pretty adept at urban life. They even make it into NYC, weirdly. They like the rat and cat populations there and have been seen in Central Park with somewhat regularity. There's no need to fret about the population of coyotes. Fun fact, trying to cull coyotes can actually cause the population to boom. They're remarkably adaptable creatures and very smart, to boot. https://www.projectcoyote.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PC_SAB_Coyote-Facts_FINAL_2020_08.pdf https://www.projectcoyote.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PC_...
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        > Unnecessary if we allow wolves to be hunted. So more people die in car crashes?. Good idea
      - wwtrv 5y ago
        Wolves are very risk averse and generally only attack pets or livestock ( as long as they are not roaming alone in the mountains unprotected ) if they have no other choice (i.e. their natural habitat was destroyed). The last thing wolves want to do is to roam around the countryside looking for pets or cattle because that greatly increases their chance of encountering humans. And in any case most attacks on pets and humans are by wolf-dog hybrid which are much more aggressive (and less fearful of humans) than wolves.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      In the case of Northern Europe, in some countries the wolf was already extinct and is now making a sporadic return. Example: the Netherlands. This is a country almost entirely urbanized with hardly any wild habitat for the wolf to hunt in. So they do a lot of hunting in people's backyard. Killing sheep and dogs. They hunt frequently so damage is large. Even a single case is very impactful. I recently saw footage of 3 wolves tearing apart somebody's dog. To the owner, that is devastating. Next, this is spread on Facebook, and soon the town is outraged. Surely you understand this won't last very long, somebody is going to take care of that wolf if it happens a few more times. I love wolves, I want them to come back and want them to thrive. But at least for the Netherlands, it just doesn't work. We don't have the natural habitat.
    - dang 5y ago
      Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. The thread was noticeably degrading already, but your comment here was a big step in the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ggm 5y ago
    Sensible rewilding schemes include compensation. I am not trying to minimise how hard this is, but there's an economic solution. Also, wild dogs probably cause as much damage as wolves do. Urbanites was a bit un-called for.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Urbanite is a descriptive word, not a epithet. It's called for whenever city-dwellers are being described.
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        Is always used as a deprecating term in this case. And insulting the same people that are taxed so the farmers can be heavily subsidized, is very unfair.
    - PicassoCTs 5y ago
      My brother got compensated, tractor sank into a beavers lodge, broke the axle, got 50 €. Was in the newspaper the day after that. Now that the beaver has destroyed the road foundation several times and the public had to pay for it, over and over, the mood of the sub-urban dwellers is slowly shifting. Turns out wildlife is not so cute, if you have to pay out of pocket for it.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        It’s not about being cute. It’s about the biodiversity that reintroducing a lot of these predators creates. This is well-documented by the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the USA which occurred in the 1990s.
      - ggm 5y ago
        Rewilded European beavers are responsible for significant improvement in water retention in upland areas reducing flooding, soil loss, and damage to crops. It's not about "cute" its about the long term qui bono. Maybe the road has to move. It's going to cost money to repair come what may, so maybe shifting it is the answer. I don't know, I just want to point out you're making huge assumptions about what the right answer IS, and also using "my specific therefore defines the general as wrong" arguments. Sure. Your brother had a bad beaver experience. European farmers who lost land to water runoff from bare hills are taking a different view.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    In Spain there is like a 3% of cattle affected by canine (wolf+dog) attacks, and those loses are covered by the government. We talk about animals that are basically left alone in the nature without protection for weeks and months. In many cases we talk about foals or old and sick cattle and often in a reduced group of farmers that claim to lose 600 animals year after year, but don't even buy a dog, that is a little suspicious if we think about it. So, maybe is not the bloodbath that many people assume
bitwize 5y ago
There're a fair number of Africans who laugh at how Europeans react to lions. Lions pose the same problems to Africans that wolves do to Europeans: they mainly take livestock and only rarely human life. In large part, any harm to humans caused by a lion is economic or secondary (e.g., starvation). In fact, lions know that if they eat a human, the human's tribe will hunt them down and retaliate (must've made for a very interesting day in Simba's circle-of-life training!), so only a sick or injured lion with few other choices for meat will attempt to eat a human. Now the hippopotamus... that is an animal widely feared in Africa. They may look fat and silly and eat plants, but they give no fucks, and will charge and trample you without a second thought.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  And the rhinoceros will charge and trample your campfire, famously.
  - stephenhuey 5y ago
    The Gods Must Be Crazy was a childhood favorite of mine, but that’s actually a myth: https://scoutlife.org/features/161345/7-animal-myths-that-everyone-thinks-are-true/ https://scoutlife.org/features/161345/7-animal-myths-that-ev... But definitely keep your distance from hippos, the most dangerous animal in Africa. They kill hundreds to thousands of people per year.
    - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
      Thousands is probably pushing it, they kill around ~500 a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...
      - stephenhuey 5y ago
        I saw that, but many other places cite numbers such as 3,000. Having lived on that continent for many years, I’d expect many would go unreported in official tallies.
tomcam 5y ago
You definitely have more interesting conversations than I have. I have known many people from Poland, many people from China, many from Mexico, and many people from Japan. Yet I was never smart enough to survey them systematically about their reactions to another country’s views on wolves.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  All it takes is having lunch with fellow exchange students, or expat coworkers after graduating and deciding to stay in your country of study. Nothing complicated - although obviously not really a thing in the last few years. I live in Sweden. The topic of a wolf crossing borders with Norway where the conservation laws are different comes up every few years. The attitude of people in different countries to wolves (or any topic of the day really) gets discussed.

detaro 5y ago

That's a ... very simplified view on that topic.

andrepd 5y ago

> The country with the most extensive historical records is France, where nearly 7,600 fatal attacks were documented from 1200 to 1920.[1][2] There are few historical records or modern cases of wolf attacks in North America. In the half-century up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, three in North America, and more than 200 in south Asia.[3] Wolf attacks are a nearly irrelevant problem. Older generations are irrationally/disproportionately afraid of wolf attacks.

xwolfi 5y ago
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > imagine you love animals so much you decide to dedicate your life to breeding sheeps ... Every morning you wake up to the mutilated corpses of your little sheeps. Nice melodrama. I will say it again knowing that people don't want the truth and is not ready for the truth: https://revistajaraysedal.es/wp-content/uploads/tres-perros-atacan-a-una-vaca_1-1024x576.jpg.webp https://revistajaraysedal.es/wp-content/uploads/tres-perros-... Most of this attacks are by dogs, not by wolves By feral or by domestic dogs. The only responsible of this attacks is the shepherd, that don't feed their dogs and allow them to roam free to attack the cattle of other people. This common offenders include the Patou also. And we all pay for their loses.
  - User23 5y ago
    It’s unsurprising that dog attacks outnumber wolf attacks after wolves have been exterminated. That doesn’t really tell us anything about the danger prevalent wolves would present.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      - 5y ago

pvaldes 5y ago

Yeah, having biodiversity is a mess; there is water and food. And not having any is a Mars.

mhitza 5y ago
From the article it seems to have been extinct for around 400 years, and used in Roman arenas for their agresivity. Want to bring it back and keep it in an animal sanctuary? Sure. Free roaming herds in Europe? No thanks.

ScarletEmerald 5y ago

One sheep rancher I knew back in college was a huge fan of wolf reintroduction. According to him, the wolves killed a few sheep and almost all the coyotes, which meant he wasn't losing any sheep to coyotes. Which worked out to a major net decrease in "sheep lost to predators". That was twenty years ago, so maybe things have changed in intervening decades.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

homonculus1 5y ago

Just gotta remember the three S's

mytailorisrich 5y ago

In at least some countries in Europe where wolves or bears have been reintroduced there are compensation schemes for loss of cattle. This can actually lead to fraud: one of your sheep died in the mountain? Another victim of a wolf...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]