Elks are sovereign citizens. They do not respect admiralty court statutes of corporate land ownership. They are travelers on the land.
A happy ending would be the restoration of a food web that prevents overpopulation of elk, I want to rewild the continent so badly, but I don't think that will happen. More effective human hunting to control numbers is preferable to forests losing their undergrowth to an imbalance of ungulates.
I went to Scotland and the deer have done a number on the wilderness because they'll eat tree shoots. So all you get is vast grasses and this red vine shit over rolling hills and mountains.
At their national museum in Edinburgh, they had this exhibit on re-introducing wolves - which would actually work pretty great! That was one thing Europeans always asked me about Canada, have you seen wolves have you seen bears? People long for a natural connection to their lands and know, even at a very deep level, that something has gone terribly wrong with the natural world. Unfortunately, they'd have to re-introduce like Yellowstone grey wolves and not indigenous wolves (because all those were killed by the 17th century) but it's better than the alternative of letting hunters out to kill tons of deer and hoping the deer don't just figure out how to avoid being killed at massive rates.
I've read that there's kind of an impasse to rewilding Scotland. In order to to reintroduce predators, private landowners would ask for the installation of fences, but Scotland has a "right to roam" enabling the freedom of all persons to walk and hike anywhere. As a result, fences are not able to be installed as they would prohibit roaming on public and private land.
How truly strange this all is.
"We'd love to save the world but actually the rules say we can't" is my least favourite lib excuse
fences are not able to be installed as they would prohibit roaming on public and private land.
Just add a gate with a closing spring wtf.
"This chest-high fence absolutely prevents me from going in this direction"
-Scots
"This chest-high fence absolutely prevents me from crossing the country in a totally straight line"
-Geowizard
Fences wouldn't stop wolves anyway. They're smart, and they can dig and jump.
There's plenty of European wolves they could bring in. Grab some from Sweden.
I think you might be right, maybe I mixed it up in my head with the exhibit pointing to other successful re-introduction programs like Yellowstone instead of saying it had to be north american wolves.
There are still some eurasian wolves left in parts of eastern Europe and the steppe, I think. They'd be a little more "local" than North American wolves.
Unfortunately, they’d have to re-introduce like Yellowstone grey wolves and not indigenous wolves (because all those were killed by the 17th century)
Meh, at a certain point a wolf is a wolf. That being said, there are still gray wolves in Europe, so we could just use those. Not that it'll ever happen; not in my lifetime, at least.
As far as I know north American wolves arrived in NA at the same time as humans during the last ice age. They've only had 10-15 thousand years to diverge from Eurasian wolves. They could figure it out.
I feel really conflicted about personally hunting deer. They are quite over populated in my area and I know it's fucking up the environment so I think hunting would morally be the right thing to do. I just don't think that I could pull the trigger.
I work in the conservation field. Vast majority of hunters are ethical when it comes to hunting and conservation. They disproportionately support conservation more than anyone else through hunting tags.
I support ethical hunters. But I also really wish we can reintroduce top predators which will keep deer and elk populations at healthy levels.
Yeah I have no problem with other people hunting deer, I let the locals hunt on my land. I just don't know that I could personally pull to the trigger. I'm all for reintroduction of predators but I live in dairy country so it'll never happen.
This is a type of liberalism. The deer individually are cute and nice, but the system demands correction.
Also if you want to start thinking in deep time, eventually ecosystems ought to find a sort of balance. Maybe in ten thousand years humans will all be dead, and our pet dogs and cats will be apex predators, stalking through irradiated forests for feral piglets and monkeys.
I know the system needs correction and it's not going to happen naturally as long humans live in area. I know a survival situation I could hunt but I've never purposely killed anything in my life so it's a question I've been wrestling with. My current solution is just to let my friend and neighbors hunny on my land. But they all want the big healthy bucks which is the opposite of what natural population control would do.
I have looked into getting the birth control darts that some areas use for population control but they don't seem to available to the general public.
Can we hollow out several of the flyover states and allow that to be an enormous prairie with huge herds of roaming wild bison?
That would require all the farmlands to be restored. There’s only like .01% left of the original tall grass prairie. Depressing stat.
Look up Midewin tall grass prairie and national tall grass prairie in Kansas. Beautiful places I love.
Give all the land in the middle of the country back tribes and confine the rest of the population to the coast.
Give all the land
in the middle of the countryback to tribesand confine the rest of the population to the coast.ftfy
Fair enough. I figured giving it all back is unrealistic but so is my idea so might as well dream big.
The only happy ending I'd settle for is reintroducing wolves across their natural range, ending the cattle and pork production industries, unfencing the west, and feeding everyone who complains to aforementioned wolves, starting with the rancher class of the Dakotas.
Bless them.
"...while private owners are saying ‘The elk are eating us out of house and home!’”
get em
Deer do this with the local national park. It is cut up into bits by privately owned farms and the deer go out at night to eat the crops and then hide on federal land during the day.
I mean, we very directly teach them that if they go certain places they're liable to be killed and they go others they'll stay safe. It's just evolution in motion. Guess it's cool that people see these animals aren't just meat with a nervous system but clearly have some kind of conscious awareness of what's safe and what isn't.
I wonder if the there elks are passing this information to their offsprings?
Probably not with language obviously, but just showing them where to go and when is enough for any animal to learn by observation.
Fawns would follow their mother and learn opportune eating and hiding strategies, those that didn't learn would likely just end up on the hood of someone's range rover.
It appears that these with different behaviour - say even for just a day or two late - simply didn't survive to "skew" the statistics.
This sounds more like culture than evolution. They have to learn where the danger is, then transmit that information across generations and to other deer. It seems unlikely that ever individual deer is figuring this out on their own.
BYU study finds that people of color were marked by the curse of Ham
spoiler
I didn't read the article, I just can't resist taking shots at Breed 'em Young University
Mormons; Nice people, if you're white and rigidly conform to their beliefs and never, ever, ask any questions.
This isn't survivorship bias at all. They studied the elk by tagging a number of the before the hunting season and monitored them from before hunting season, during bow season, open season, and then after.
For it to be survivorship bias, they'd need to retroactively study the behavior of elk that had already lived through hunting season. Unless what you mean is that elk cannot learn behavior to adapt to human behavior.
there are multiple hunting seasons year after year
i assume the elk that coincidently moved to private land lived, their offspring did the same and so on
You are describing learning. That’s not survivorship bias of the study, that’s the species adapting
So you don't have a problem with the study, you only think this is selective pressure eliciting an evolutionary response rather than a behavioral response to repeated human behavior. Either way, the study shows that a significant number of elk are likely to be somewhere other than public lands during hunting season.
The comments on this thread are like, Deer are smart, also they must die because greedy capitalists / imperialism / settler-colonialism fucked up the environment.
Well they're a prey animal. Their reproductive and dietary adaptations are tweaked for predation.
It's just that, I don't want to conserve how things are right now -- with farmers, landowners, and resource extraction being at play while conservationists, water and land defenders, scramble to save whatever they can. I want it all to be given back to people, especially and most importantly Indigenous tribes, who will naturalize it. But until then, we have to resort to stop-gap measures which annoy me greatly, because they ultimately end with things staying the same instead of giving the land back.
"Indigenous tribes, who will naturalize it." Try not do do this. Native peoples aren't some mystic font of nature magic. They are people like everyone else.
back in the days of sailing vessels, whales would avoid whalers by swimming upwind as it was much harder for the whalers to follow them, this tactic emerged in the whale population and spread to whales across the planet within a single year which suggests the whales who first learned this technique taught it to other whales.
I've watched bison do movemenys like this north of Yellowstone.
I can't tell if this is a joke or if it's an actual study
