Oxajil said:
luc said:
While there are of course many cruel idiots among hunters, many have a very healthy and common sense outlook on nature: they love nature, they love wildlife and animals, do a lot to protect them and understand them, yet at the same time also understand that nature is about life and death, about predators and prey, about balance and so on. So they (rightly, IMO) find the idea ridiculous to worship wolves and re-populate a densely populated place like Germany with them, which often is fueled by an anti-hunter ideology, kind of like "if we have wolves to take out wild game, then we don't need hunters anymore!" It's really anti-human if you think about it.
The outlook on nature you described sounds like a healthy and balanced way to look at it. Re-populating wolves in a populated area is indeed a dangerous idea. Children can be seen as 'prey' and attacked in such a situation. In the Netherlands, wolf sightings are quite rare, but the ones who have visited actually came from Germany. One of the wolves that was spotted (November, 2016) came from eastern Germany. That wolf sighting was the second sighting in about a 100 years.
In this paper, there is an account of attacks by wolves in different countries _http://www.nina.no/archive/nina/PppBasePdf/oppdragsmelding/731.pdf And as Oxajil indicated, it is children who are most at risk, according to the records.
It is true as the hunter says that wolfes may pose a danger to people on foot, wolves can be a travel hazard. The question is if these will not always exist. According to statitistics: _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate in Germany more than 4 out of 100,000 people get killed in road accidents every year, and that is very low in comparison with many other countries. Of course we do not wish pedestrians to die, so here is some advice from Russia if one meets a wolf in the wild: _https://sputniknews.com/world/201611071047152587-russia-wolves-kids-axe/
“Once our sons, aged 12 and 14, were on their way home when, all of a sudden, they saw a wolf running right at them,” the kids’ parents told local media.
Yevgeni Seberov, a local forester, said that when stumbling upon a wolf or any other dangerous predator one should never run off like the two boys did.
“They can jump you at night but hardly in broad daylight.”
Another former forestry serviceman said a slingshot might be much more effective. But both men agreed the most important thing was not to panic and not to show the animal fear.
Couold some of the children, women and men who died or were injured in the past, due to wolves have saved their lives if they had known not to panic? Probably not in all cases, what if the wolf was rabid? What if there were to many wolves like 400?:
_http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1354445/Super-pack-400-wolves-kill-30-horses-just-days-remote-Russian-village.html
_http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/russia-wolves-siberia-yakutia-wwf-423480
_http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/wolf-attacks-lead-to-state-of-emergency-in-russias-siberia-regio/
400 is a lot, too many, but from the point of the environment, in areas where there are many deers even a single wolf will make a difference. This I know from observations made by an acquaintance who has seen a wolf twice. He said the deers in his forest changed behaviour when a wolf was around. Instead of roaming inside the forest, the deers assembled in more open areas and stayed together. In the above context it was interesting to listen to another acquaintance at one moment cursing the wolves, but also upset with the deers because they do much damage to his trees.
Wolves may be a problem to humans and so can deers be, since they tend to carry the ticks around, which in some cases get transferred to humans. If the ticks are infected, they transmit diseases: _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_disease Therefore, it is true that wolfes can be dangerous for humans, but is this compensated if the tick bearing deers are kept better in control by wolfes? Because, if there were no antibiotices more people would suffer from ticks than from wolfes.
Then I looked at the population numbers of wolves:
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gray_wolf_populations_by_country It is remarkable that some areas that are not that big claim to carry quite a population. Lebanon has 50 wolves, Israel 150! Macedonia 1000? From Macedonia there is also an article with a video of one man who has three wolfes as pets: _https://sputniknews.com/europe/201702111050575839-macedonia-villager-wolves/ What amazed me is that some areas carry a lot of wolfes and no headlines, while others make world news based on even a single sighting.
Here is a page that wants not only wolves, but other large predator to be introduced in Europe. _http://www.wolvesandhumans.org/index.htm
One danger to wolfes, at least in western Europe, could be that they might interbreed with dogs: _http://www.consevol.org/pdf/Hindrikson_etal_2016_BiolRev.pdf
In conclusion, I agree with the hunter that wolfes can be a risk (just like some dogbreeds that have been prohibited in some countries), but I also think that many deers can be an indirect risk to human life and a problem if the goal is to grow trees for timber, furniture, and firewood. Deers when killed become meat on the table, and before that they were having a much freer life than the average consumer meat. If not culled properly by hunters then a few more wolves to keep the deer population down may be a good thing. What some of the environmentalist probably want, is to create a situation where hunting is limited to the max, as a result there is a "need" for reintroducing big predators.