Are You Okay With Subsidizing the Slaughter of Wolves?

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Answer by Oliver Starr:

Any dog that's better looking than you are will up your chances considerably.  And no matter how good looking you are, there's always a dog that's better.  I rest my case with the image below:

I'm decidedly average in "cuteness" but with Bixby… bam – I'm a true babe magnet. -yep, ladies, I can hear the "oohs ahhs" all the way over here

Just thought I'd update this with a current photo.  He's just as much of a babe magnet now, only in new, improved, Clydesdale size:

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Wolves are called keystone predators for a reason. Not only do they improve the genetic fitness of the species they prey upon, but their kills provide food for:
– bears
– cougars
-coyotes
-wolverines
-foxes
-ravens, magpies, jays, crows
-insects
-bacteria

Humans kill far more elk and moose than wolves and we take the biggest, the best, the healthiest – with every kill we destroy the strength of the species, with every kill the wolves improve it.

We should stay out of the way, and your comment simply proves you know next to nothing about nature. This is just another argument for why stupid people should be allowed to buy firearms.
More on Video
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Wolf with bone, shot winter 2012 at Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, Ramah, NM. Animal in the photo is Aqutaq, our arctos/tundrarum ambassador wolf.  An iPhone 4s was used to capture this image as she threw and caught this old bone during a break in a play session with other wolves.

This photo was also shot with an iPhone4S – this is fallen leaf lake near the Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe, CA. Image was shot from shore at around 10AM on a windless spring morning.

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Post by Oliver Starr:

Trappers! Put Up or Shut Up!

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While there's been lots written about birds, chimps and cetaceans, my own vote goes to canids.  Here's one example from NOVA and another from my own personal videos:

This dog knows over 1000 words!
http://youtu.be/_6479QAJuz8?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

This wolf solves puzzles: (and steals my Apple hat as a reward)  by the way, watch the little "butt hop" that keeps her tail from getting slammed in the door. In spite of never having done this before, she clearly understood the mechanics of the spring loaded closing mechanism.  Smart!

http://youtu.be/xRzLIw3tHyo?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

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I'm not sure it's possible to answer this question with any degree of accuracy since we haven't even reliably identified all terrestrial vertebrates and have only limited knowledge of the numbers of many.  There's even great controversy about how many wolves there are in just a few states, for example. Even though that number is a trivial component of total weight, every little bit adds up.

The one thing we can be sure of is that the ratio gets worse every year.  Humans have virtually no selective pressure put upon them while wild animals have more every year.

Making matters worse, poaching, mining, deforestation, competition for range with domestic livestock and the ever increasing demand we humans have for land are all reducing the numbers and thus weight of the wild denizens of our planet.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if we were close to 99% vs 1%.  This is a sad statistic considering that as recently as 700,000 years ago, humanity was nearly wiped out: Extinction Events That Almost Wiped Out Humans

Thus, in just a blink of the evolutionary eye, we went from an inconsequential component of the terrestrial vertebrate population to one that is not only dominant buy massively so.

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Trappers! Put Up or Shut Up!

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