Not sure what to think about this one....

A new reality series follows a British couple as they attempt to integrate themselves
into a pack of wolves. It makes for good drama, but are they downright crazy?

Full story here.

I think it's crazy, because they're not really accomplishing anything by it.

Actually, I watched the earlier version where the wolfman had raised a family of cubs and interfaced with them at their level. He learned a lot about behavior, and was able to help Polish farmers develop a predator detterent using howling wolf recordings that he recognized as territorial calls, thus keeping other wolves away from the livestock.

I'm not a big advocate of reintroduction, our world has changed in the past 100+ years since wolves roamed freely on this continent. We no longer have the sort of habitat to support wolf populations without creating strong interface issues. Coyotes are bad enough as it is, with how predatory they are on pets. Wolves can and will hunt humans as well as livestock, and the demography in the lower 48 is not conducive to pack lifestyle. That said, the more we can understand about wolf behavior, the more likely we are to be able to deal with the inevitable confrontations and clashes.

All the farmers and ranchers I know have no tolerance for coyotes, consider them a nuisance, and will shoot them on sight if they can, or pay someone else to if the wife's cat should go missing. I can't imagine they will be any more amenable to what they'd consider a bigger, deadlier coyote.

Here's a good read on human-wolf interactions (& attacks):

http://www.wc.adfg.state.ak.us/pubs/techpubs/research_pdfs/techb13_full.pdf

The study identifies that a threat is there and will persist. The conclusion is that the study was done where human/wolf encounters and interactions is limited due to the vast area and diminished population densities involved, and therefore that the likelihood of confrontations will exacerbate as population densities increase.

Given that this study positively identifies a real risk, and that such risk is proportional to the incidence of encounter, I would have to say that as wolf populations in the lower 48 increase, there will be an increase in the number of attacks on humans, and by inference more attacks on pets and livestock. Will this be acceptable? It depends on the rate of increase of incidents and their perceived severity I reckon.

Well, all things considered (if you live in wilderness areas):
Get a partner instead of a pet (nothing but annoying animate needy useless toys anyways), become vegetarian (no more beef industry is less desertification anyway, many deserts have expanded to 3 times their original size because of the beef industry), and walk with a big stick.

The wolves deserve to live just as much as we do. We can change and can choose to live in harmony with the wild, whereas animals are hardwired to be what they are.

But, concerning Wolfman, he is a nut. His wolves aren't really a pack. They don't hunt. Their heirarchy is based solely on who first eats what he brings them and that's about it. They have no real wolf dynamic. They live in a cage. They are not wild wolves. They are no different than dog pets. He just likes being intimate with them and I think he's boring to watch. Maybe he and his wife should have a couple children instead.

Anybody can make a TV show these days. It's sad, considering that quality television is not as popular as it was when it was the only option. Humans should try harder for dignity, not just weird levels of self-esteem.
"Ohhohohho, watch me lick my dog's nose, everybody."

I had a wolf experience last week.

I was sleeping in a camper-trailer about 50 feet from a bridge over a small river in Northern Ontario. At 5.00am a wolf stood on the bridge and howled his brains out, there is no sleeping through that alarm clock.

Moose hunting season is on now and you mimic moose calls to try to lure them out of cover. The problem is that wolves will sometimes respond to the moose call thinking that you are their prey. It really makes the hair stand up on your neck when you hear the wolves howling all-around you and you know they are searching for the source of the call!

The good thing is that once they get downwind and get a sniff of human scent they are usually gone in a flash.

The bad thing is that with all that wolf scent around your hunting site, your chances of seeing a moose really reduced.

Mike

Trog, if you assume I have something against wolves, you are mistaken. I had an arctic wolf hybrid as a pet for a while, very cool animal, very mellow, but the way he would open his mouth and tear up carpet remnants I gave him to play with was truly awesome. I believe I could've fit my size 7 3/4 head in his fully open maw. I rescued him from a kennel and took care of him till I could find a farmer north of Spokane who could give him a better taste of the wide open spaces yet still see to his more domestic needs.

I don't know as deserve has anything to do with the issue. Wolves were removed from our environment except for a very few small areas quite a while back, and our culture and the way the land is utilized and occupied now will not support a reintroduction on anything more than a novel scale. As the wolf population in the lower 48 increases, and they exceed their artifical boundaries more and more, they will be treated exactly the same as grizzly bears and cougars who make excursions outside of their allowed boundaries. When it comes to the public welfare, there have been very few compromises that allowed predators to remain in close proximity to people and their livestock. There are lots of things we can change to accomodate the natural world, but the cost is usually too high for the general public to tolerate. When given a choice between doing without for something mostly unseen but which poses additional threat, no matter how slight, vs. having what we want to make our lives easier, eventually we always choose the latter.

I do agree that Wolfman is a bit eccentric in his methods, but even under controlled conditions he has made some significant accomplishments that are providing at least one demographic with measurable benefit, without large debtriment to the wolf population to boot. That seems worthy, even if he is a bit of a nut job.