Free: Contests & Raffles.
Predation. One of the questions on everyone’s mind is, do wolves and other predators limit the number of game animals? Limit means reduce the population or control the population and the answer is: Absolutely. As I noted back in 1993, wolves and other predators — and I stress other predators — routinely keep ungulate populations at ten percent or less than what the habitat would otherwise support. It’s amazing the photos you get nowadays that you can pull of the internet. A lot of these aren’t my own photos. This was taken by wolf researchers. There’s a pack of wolves trying to bring down a moose.Again, so it’s not just wolves. It’s wolves on top of grizzly bears. You can tell grizzly bears from black bears, the story is, you know, bear bells. You look at the bear droppings, the bear bells are on the grizzly bear droppings, not the black bear’s. That’s sort of a side issue. You note the long claws on the grizzlies and they have a hump on the back. So it’s wolves on top of grizzly bears.On top of black bear predation, you have predation by mountain lions. This was a photo taken by a cell phone. It’s not a very good photo, but this is the mountain lion here trying to take down a six-point bull elk. How these lions kill? Their canines are about this long. They’re not enough to kill instantaneously. And on a big animal they can’t break its neck, so what they do is they crush the windpipe, like African lions do. They actually suffocate the animal. So that’s why they’re just grabbing it at the neck. And once it gets a hold like that in that deep a snow the bull’s basically dead. And that’s probably a bull, alive and in good health probably, 1,000 pounds.Anacapa Coyote predation. One of the things all predators do, especially wolves and canids, is they go for the rear end of the animal. It’s the hardest to defend. People say they hamstring them. They don’t really try to hamstring them they just try to do massive tissue damage. And they actually try to get at the soft underbelly which is your part right here where there’s no bones and stuff and just rip that open and the guts fall out and then basically the animal’s dead sooner and not later. And they basically, in a lot of cases, eat them alive. OK on that stuff.And all this predation is what’s called additive. OK, additive means, you know it’s the wolves kill one, and the mountain lions kill one that’s two. It’s not as if the wolves kill one and the mountain lions don’t kill one; that’s what’s called compensatory. A lot of these biologists will tell you that predation is compensatory and that’s not true. It’s actually additive.
I wish we could put all of the wolf extremists (pro and anti) on a small island in a distant ocean where they would never be heard from again...then here in the western US, we continue responsible wildlife management as we have for nearly a century without all of the screeching and whining and crying and lying.
Quote from: idahohuntr on January 05, 2014, 10:28:53 PMI wish we could put all of the wolf extremists (pro and anti) on a small island in a distant ocean where they would never be heard from again...then here in the western US, we continue responsible wildlife management as we have for nearly a century without all of the screeching and whining and crying and lying. You and wolfbait on the same island? Is this going to be on PPV?
Quote from: KFhunter on January 05, 2014, 10:34:26 PMQuote from: idahohuntr on January 05, 2014, 10:28:53 PMI wish we could put all of the wolf extremists (pro and anti) on a small island in a distant ocean where they would never be heard from again...then here in the western US, we continue responsible wildlife management as we have for nearly a century without all of the screeching and whining and crying and lying. You and wolfbait on the same island? Is this going to be on PPV?Not so much, but if you consider me a pro-wolf extremist you definitely should catch a ride to that island with wolfbait. Think of all the college age hippie earth first girls that will be there? You guys might like it
"then here in the western US, we continue responsible wildlife management as we have for nearly a century"