On Dec. 24,
2017, an influential nationalistic member of the Danish parliament, Søren Espersen, said, "Wolves attack small
children and old people. It's nuts to have them in Denmark...[translated
from the Danish]." Espersen is a
member if the Danish People’s Party (DF). In May, 2017, former Danish Minister
of Finance (Secretary of the Treasury) and center-right conservative party member, Henning Dyremose, compared the policies of the DF to
the Ku Klux Klan. Dyremose later explained that he made the remark based on his childhood experiences while living in America.
Søren Espersen wants an
open season on Danish wolves, as does a coalition of European nationalistic
parties, on behalf of sports hunting, sheep and other livestock farmers, and to
undermine the science of the European Union. For the sake of ecosystems stability and
species conservation, the EU Habitats Directive gives wolves maximum protections,
and at first only allowed the destruction of wolves verified to be a direct threat
to humans. And it offers incentives for member states to pay compensation for
livestock loss. This occurred as a result of the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European
Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which went into effect in 1982. European
countries that are not a member of the EU, such as Norway, do allow limited
hunting of wolves, and there are efforts now to intensely expand culling wolves. This Nordic fear of wolves makes no sense to senior science advisor, Susanne Hanssen, of the Norwegian Environment Agency. Only one case of a fatal wolf attack is recorded in its entire 1200 year history. Sweden has
occasionally flouted the directive, with special hunting permits, with the EU responding with warnings. The EU has
also allowed a culling of 40 wolves in France, which polarized many.
To be fair, it isn’t only far-right, nationalists who want to hunt down wolves when perceived as a threat to livestock. “If you can’t eliminate animals that attack, the situation won’t get any better,” said José Bové, a Green member of the European Parliament, who was formerly a sheep farmer in Aveyron in southern France. “All the efforts to protect shepherds, whether it’s fences or dogs or whatever — none of them have worked.” --Politico
An underlying motivation
for Europe’s far-right, nationalistic parties to spread myths, such as Denmark’s
Espersen with the big bad wolf fairy tale, is to destroy the European
Union. On Dec. 16, 2017, the leadership of these parties convened "For a Europe of Sovereign Nations” in Prague, Poland (already facing
EU sanctions for putting the constitutional
judiciary under significant executive government control). Here they
“attacked the EU for its migrant policies, accused its leaders of trying to
create a super state run by Brussels and praised U.S. President Trump's
approach to migration."
That’s also true in the US: “The recent anti-wolf campaign
represents an extraordinary cultural and political victory by the far-right
wing in the Rocky Mountains. A loose coalition of some ranchers, hunters, and
anti-government zealots demonized the gray wolves reintroduced to Montana and
Idaho from Canada in the mid 1990s by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. They
cast the animals as huge, aggressive, disease-ridden monsters bent on ravaging
livestock, elk, deer, and even people.”
While it is true that there have
been historical attacks by wolves on humans, such as 7,600 fatal attacks
… documented from 1200–1920 in France, the truth of wolves’ danger is an
entirely different story. Most of those attacks occurred wherever Europe was
waging wars and directly threatening wolf existence. In southern Asian
countries, where spreading population densities have wiped out wilderness
habitats, and where there is little scientific oversight and education to help
people understand the wolf, there have been 200 reported deaths by wolves since
1950. In that period, 3 fatalities have been documented in North
America and eight in Europe and Russia combined.
Putting all that in perspective, in 2013
alone 1.25 million people died as a result of vehicles… and in the 20th
century alone, at least 200,000,000
(200 million) have perished in wars. Additionally, “each year, dogs kill or injure many more people than
wolves. In 2012, the World Health Organization reported that, worldwide,
over 55,000 people die annually of rabies, 99% of them infected by dog
bites. Children are especially at risk, since they are bitten by dogs 3-5
times more frequently than adults.” --(Overall & Love 2001 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417736?). And in the UK
alone, “Government officials and senior
police officers were presented this week [Jan. 21, 2017] with findings indicating that around 15,000 sheep were
killed by loose dogs in 2016, more than ten times higher than the number
previously thought.”
That’s not to justify that it’s OK for wolves to kill people. As with
driver’s ed, people simply need to learn how to live with the presence of the
wolf since it is scientifically considered an animal of human importancefor the sake of a
planet with a functional biosphere capable of supporting civilization.
The first chapter of “wolf-ed” would be to sift fact from fiction: "News
media are attracted to controversy, and wolf recovery, depredations, control
programs, and most any other wolf-related topics seem irresistible. The
Yellowstone wolf reintroduction was intensively covered by sixty international
media. Popular information about wolves is often biased or inaccurate (Wolves and Human
Communities). When wolf stories appear, the extreme views of opponents and
supporters of wolves are often highlighted, further polarizing the issue.
The way the media covers wolves leaves the impression that they are more of a
problem than other animals (Reintroducing the Gray Wolf to
Central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park)"
Through a scientifically understood function, called trophic cascade, large
predators enrich the essential biodiversity and ecological stability of the planetary
habitats which gives us oxygen and helps clean up our carbon footprints, give
us our food, etc. All the biology which supports civilization is enriched
by the top-down effects of the wolf.
The impact of shooting a wolf is quite exactly, emotionally and otherwise, the same as a home invasion
where the burglar shoots a family member. It is devastating to the
family, lo the community, and as a keystone species with the capacity
for a trophic cascade, it devastates the entire ecosystem.
Returning to the Danish issue, over two centuries ago wolves had been hunted
into extinction in this tiny country of 5.7
million. Evidence
indicates that they were “…functionally extinct in Denmark at least since
1750.” In 2012, a dead wolf was found in southern Denmark and soon after,
someone spotted the first wild wolf since 1813. Later DNA
analysis of a female’s feces indicated that she had traveled over 550
kilometers (341 miles), from a wilderness near Berlin. The working theory
for their return is that they had been “…young wolves rejected by their
families who [were] looking for new hunting grounds," according to Peter
Sunde, senior scientist at the Aarhus University Institute for
Bioscience.
They have now formed at
least one pack with young, and perhaps two, due to suspected attacks on sheep
in other wilderness areas. Danish sheep farmers, having no experience
with a large predator, are understandably concerned,. Since 2012, farmers have
received compensations of over 50,000 kroner ($7,000.00) for confirmed
losses.
Culling wolves as a preventive measure may only be a perception.
"As human populations continue to grow and we expand further into
wilderness areas, we will have to find better ways to coexist with wildlife:
particularly those that threaten our livelihoods or even our lives." BBC
Earth: When you start killing wolves,
something odd happens
Explaining a 2014 study, Guillaume Chapron of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences feels that the problem, and therefore solution, lies with us. "Wolves are quite adaptable to humans," he says. "The question is whether humans are adaptable to wolves."
Whilst killing an animal perceived as a threat may seem like an easy solution, it may not prove the most effective in the long-term. In fact, [the study] suggested that wolf culls can backfire in the short term by increasing the frequency of wolves killing livestock.
"Our results undermine the justifications used to kill wildlife," says [coauthor of the study, Adrian Treves of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Therefore, more broadly, predator control as a government policy needs to be scrutinized."
***
The preponderance of the
scientific evidence shatters the myth of the big bad wolf. Arguably the most successful to adapt (in terms of
distribution) of all mammals next to man (woman), wolves are integral to the evolution
and stability of a great many habitats on the planet, from the arctic wolf of the far north to the near-solitary maned wolf of Argentina… and the highlands Himalayan wolf to the hot deserts Arabian wolf, just to name a few.
They provide a huge service to every ecosystem within which they interact, and
not only by scavenging dead animals and directly controlling fauna, which are diseased or otherwise devastate habitats with
overpopulation, from small rodents to the ungulates, such as deer, elk
and the bighorn.
The beneficial impact of this large intelligent predator actually trickles down
(please excuse this economically nasty word) to the very fundamental fabric of
any habitat, increasing biodiversity, through that ecological function described
above, the trophic cascade.
When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, this is what
happened. Its physical geography actually changed, beneficially.
“There is no doubt that wolf attacks on humans have occurred in Europe, although there are few verified reports of attacks past the beginning of the twentieth century. Today there is considered to be very little risk to humans from wolves in Europe, yet public attitudes remain negative. Research shows that wolf attacks are perceived to be more common than they actually are, and fear of wolves is still a significant factor in opposition to wolf recovery in many areas.
This fear can be effectively addressed by good education, through lectures, talks, information centres and publications about wolves. It is important that education is carried out in all sections of society, and is honest about the risks posed by wolves. Denying that wolves are potentially dangerous can be counter-productive, as anti-wolf campaigners will accuse conservationists of deliberately misleading the public. Better understanding of the risks reduces fear. Education should include discouraging the public from feeding wolves or approaching too closely, as most incidents where people have been injured by wolves in the last few years have involved animals that had become habituated to being around people and associating them with food.”--The Wolves and Human Foundation
And let us
not forget that man’s best friend was a wolf in a time long forgotten except
through the DNA
evidence
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