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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNY Times: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist? Long but worth the read
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/magazine/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolf-scientist.html?action=click&blockId=signature-journalism-vi&contentCollection=Trending&fallback=1&geoContinent=NA&geoCountry=US&geoRegion=GA&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article&recAlloc=random&recId=1713NwnMLA4M7DzGJj2e0FbnFZK®ion=CompanionColumnYou might not guess from looking at him that Rob Wielgus was until recently a tenured professor of wildlife ecology. Wielgus likes to spend time in the backwoods of the American West that lie off the edge of most tourist maps, and he dresses the part: motorcycle leathers, tattoos on both forearms, the stringy hairs of a goatee dangling like lichen from his lower lip. Atop his bald head he often wears a battered leather bush hat of the type seen at Waylon Jennings concerts. A Camel smolders in his face like a fuse. The first time I called him, he told me that he couldnt chat because he was riding his Harley home from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.
snip
Wielgus had spent years in the surrounding woods doing research, and he loved the area. Now he considered it hostile territory. Before he pushed through the swinging doors of a bar, he paused and lifted an untucked shirt to show me the black handle of a .357 handgun poking from the front pocket of his jeans. Too many death threats, he said. I never started carrying this till I started studying wolves.
snip
In the fall of 2014, Wielgus and a colleague published the labs first wolf study in the journal PLOS One. Crunching a quarter-century of data about wolf attacks on livestock in three other states, the authors found something unusual: Killing wolves one year was associated with more, not fewer, deaths of livestock the following year. The paper further suggested that killing wolves may cause the increased livestock deaths. Just because two things are correlated doesnt mean that one causes the other, but Wielgus posited a firm connection. As he explained to me, killing wolves fractures the highly regimented social order of the pack. So, if you kill wolves, you get more breeding pairs, you get more livestock depredation. This was of a piece with his previous work: When humans kill the apex predator, a chaotic reshuffling is set into motion, with unintended consequences.
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NY Times: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist? Long but worth the read (Original Post)
Botany
Jul 2018
OP
DBoon
(22,340 posts)1. Another example of political supression of science
deserves a wider audience
nmgaucho
(527 posts)2. Thanks for the article
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Thinking Like a Mountain, A Sand County Almanac-Aldo Leopold