Are wild boar a nuance in Europe like they are in Texas?
telesilla 23 hours ago [-]
Very much. In Portugal, where I know their bad behavior from, it's almost impossible to keep a garden unless you have excellent fencing and ideally a loud dog to let you know when they are on your land (not that you want them to actually meet, that would be dangerous).
petre 7 hours ago [-]
Get a pair of Jagd Terriers and they'll fix your boar and also all of your rodent problems.
Yes, very much so here in and around Berlin. No garden is safe, and neither is your trash unless you lock it in somewhere. They no longer mind human presence at all, which was not the case 20 years ago (they used to be very shy), and they have become really smart, too, and have opened or unhinged our fence gate several times.
ben_w 17 hours ago [-]
> and they have become really smart, too, and have opened or unhinged our fence gate several times.
I'm also in Berlin, have been woken up by them in the night, looked out the window and watched them barge right through a neighbour's gate.
riffraff 22 hours ago [-]
in Italy they're a significant issue due to foreign species having been introduced years ago. The new species reproduce faster than they are killed by hunters or predators.
randycupertino 20 hours ago [-]
I went through a phase where I was recommended a bunch of boar traps on youtube. There is one called "the pig brig" that is like a soft net where they can go in under the net but not get out. It's sad they all get trapped and then shot but sounds like necessary because they destroy land and native species. It's sad watching the pigs panic and run around trying to escape once they realize they are trapped :(
American English to YNews -- nuance is not nuisance
randycupertino 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry was autocorrect, geeze!
LoganDark 22 hours ago [-]
Not sure how that has anything to do with america
opan 22 hours ago [-]
Perhaps due to the prior Texas mention and an assumption the user lives there.
LoganDark 22 hours ago [-]
If they were using swipe typing on a mobile device, nuance and nuisance have very nearly the same pattern.
it feels a bit hateful to chalk it up to the dialect of english, as if the commenter is simply stupid
randycupertino 20 hours ago [-]
It was autocorrect, my bad.
mistrial9 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Cordiali 16 hours ago [-]
Your comment incorrectly attributed an autocorrect error to the person's dialect.
That error was entirely your own, and a conscious one, unlike what you were commenting on.
setr 21 hours ago [-]
The poster can be presumed American.. but what does that have to do with the mistake made?
randycupertino 20 hours ago [-]
I live in the Bay Area and have an advanced degree and good career. It was a simple autocorrect error. Chill out, grammar police!!
21 hours ago [-]
kihv 1 days ago [-]
We should also definitely reintroduce lions to Southern Europe !
We know for sure they were roaming in Greece (Herodote talks about them during wars against Persia, Herakles had to kill Nemee lion according to the legend, etc.), and that they were hunted, most certainly to extinction.
usrnm 1 days ago [-]
Those are completely extinct, they were not the same lions that roam African savanna. It's too late
wffurr 21 hours ago [-]
We can get Colossal Biosciences on the case. They can add the European Lion to their list after the Woolly Mammoth.
adrian_b 5 hours ago [-]
On the territory of the present Bulgaria they survived until more recently than in Greece, and those are the lions mentioned by Herodotus, at a time when they no longer existed in Greece.
Tens of thousands of years ago, lions existed in much of Europe, Asia and North-America, but they became extinct, either because their prey was hunted more successfully by humans, or by being directly hunted by humans, especially when the latter began to have herds of domestic animals and they wanted to eliminate the predators that could endanger them.
thebytefairy 15 hours ago [-]
Herodotus, 'father of history' and 'father of lies'? Fortunately the fossil record does indeed back up the claim of lions in the region!
adrian_b 4 hours ago [-]
Herodotus in most cases reported what he had been told by others and he himself frequently expressed doubts about whether that was true or not.
In several cases where for a long time it was thought that some statements of Herodotus were false more recent research has shown that they were actually true. In some cases some statements of Herodotus seemed false due to mistranslations, e.g. where it was thought that he described some kind of giant ants, but those were in fact marmots (i.e. rodents) of normal size.
So I do not think that he deserves to be called "father of lies".
Many more recent historians have been much more biased politically, so one must read their works very carefully to distinguish facts from propaganda.
This is especially true for many very recent historians of the 20th and 21st century, many of whom deserve to be called liars much, much more than Herodotus and even than the most biased historians from the Antiquity.
teruakohatu 12 hours ago [-]
We can then introduce gorillas to control the lions. Nothing can possibly go wrong!
m000 22 hours ago [-]
And centaurs!
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
I saw something like this in the City I live in. There were Pigeons everywhere. one day ages ago I was riding my bicycle to college and I saw a hawk fly down to a group of Pigeons hanging around on the ground and grab one. The Pigeons looked surprised and did not know what to do. That was over 40 years ago when Hawks started repopulating the area.
Not long afterwards, all Pigeons started hiding and you do not see many just hanging around. One favorite place is under bridges. Shows animals will learn real fast to avoid threats :)
morkalork 20 hours ago [-]
I had a bird feeder out in my backyard one winter and had a hawk show up looking for lunch. A squirrel that was hanging around scrounging on the ground ran and hid under a cedar tree. It was interesting because for 99% of other threats, their instinct is to get off ground level and up a tree or telephone pole to safety. Apparently they're smart enough to know not to do that with birds of prey.
inshard 22 hours ago [-]
Researching this and imagining what the Romans saw in their campaigns up north, and also Asterix comics, I found this tidbit about adaptation in general: "Wolves generally follow Bergmann's rule, a biological principle stating that populations of the same species living in colder, higher-latitude environments tend to be larger than those closer to the equator."
lifestyleguru 1 days ago [-]
Across European Plain entire native wildlife down to pigeons and rats had been killed and/or consumed at some point because of wars and famines. Entire current wildlife has been reintroduced.
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
Ah yes the nice EU experiment where it uses the Netherlands for as their experimentation grounds. The goal of having more wild life is lofty, but it makes no sense in the netherlands . For the people who don't know, there weren't wild wolves up to 2015.
There now are many and they've attacked people, horses and wiped out complete herds of sheep. The amount of sheep they are killing is increasing exponentially. (not using exponentially lightly here.)
Proponents during the 2015-2020 era said that it would never come to this situation, alas.
Rhetoric questions by proponents as seen on national news website[1]:
> We hebben ook weleens last van de mens, die schieten we toch ook niet af?
> -- Aaldrik Pot
Translated:
"We also have issues with people every now and then, were not shooting them are we?"
The wolves seemingly made it back into the Netherlands on their own:
In a paper published in 2016, “The first proof of the recent presence of Wolves in the Netherlands,” authors wrote:
“In light of the expansion of wolves from the Polish border to the northwest of Germany and the sightings in Denmark, the appearance of the wolf in the Netherlands was no surprise to most experts. In March 2015, this expectation was fulfilled when, after generations without resident wolves, a single wolf wandered through the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen in broad daylight. From 7 to 10 March 2015, the Netherlands witnessed the comeback of an iconic species.”
I have zero insight into why Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands concluded in a study that "the Netherlands are legally required to contribute between 23 and 56 wolf packs" (Lost in translation? - perhaps "can support and shouldn't cull below these numbers" ?)
Dutch version of the WUR page says basically the same thing: "Uit het onderzoeksrapport blijkt dat Nederland juridisch gezien een bijdrage aan de wolvenpopulatie moet leveren van 23 tot 56 roedels. " -> the study concludes that the Netherlands has to contribute to the wolf population from 23 to 56 wolf packs.
It seems that this is part of a european "habitats directive" for managing biodiversity within Europe. This directive (according to the above paper) determined there need to be around 500 wolf packs across Europe to keep wolves at a stable level without too much inbreeding. The Netherlands was found to be able to "contribute" 23 to 56 wolf packs in this sense.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
Ah, cheers for that - I'm on the other side of the planet and was happy to do a bit of light digging on the situation but limited by not having much grasp of the written language.
hcfman 7 hours ago [-]
No. The report says it had the capacity to sustain that many.
RobotToaster 1 days ago [-]
Shame they can't swim, it would be good to see them reintroduced to the UK.
Which given how much of the private land in scotland is owned for deer or grouse shooting, that seems logical.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
That's a curious one - dated 2015 and yet articles from Scotland in 2025 and 206, in addition to notoriously unreliable "AI summaries" all assert or imply that there are currently no wolves in Scotland.
Your link might have been wishful thinking by the wilderness society boosting an unconfirmed hearsay, or perhaps it was true but the few wolves mentioned didn't flourish.
Look at the first comment, that was an April fools joke.
KaiserPro 1 days ago [-]
Ah fuck.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
We all make mistakes, as the Dalek said, climbing down off of the dustbin
zeristor 20 hours ago [-]
And bears and Lynx, Moose/Elk too I guess, Wolverines?
Actually in Kent there's a park where they are reintroducing European Bison, and alongside them some Elk. I mean it is a fenced off area experiment.
There are so many deer around here now, they're asking people to hunt them and trying to start a taste for venison.
Oarch 20 hours ago [-]
The bison have been around for 4 or so years now. It's in Blean Woods near Canterbury.
RobotToaster 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, all those, and cranes too.
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
If those were wild sheep, and the wolves came there on their own like the other comments said, isn't that just nature working as intended?
If those were private sheep, shouldn't they be better guarded?
defrost 1 days ago [-]
As a livestock owner not in the Netherlands, yes, people should guard their stock.
That's somewhat distinct from going further beyond their boundaries to wipe out threats not directly on their land.
KaiserPro 1 days ago [-]
I think the issue is that for a number of generations parts of europe have not been used to apex predators.
In the UK we've not had wolves for >200 years. Which means techniques for dealing with them have been lost, and more importantly didn't evolve with land use change. hearders used to carry weapons, and guard dogs. some places had fainting goats.
I'm not sure how wolves would work in the netherlands, as the parts that I know are all way west of the ijssel. I don't imagine that wolves are fen/polder dwellers, but I might be wrong. Again looking at the norfolk/cambridge fens there are plenty of folklore tales https://www.norfolkfolkloresociety.co.uk/post/the-spectral-w...
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
The UK is just sickening for exterminating so many animal species, and now they're after badgers. What the hell is wrong with that country? Who will scold Toad out of his motorcar addiction??
defrost 1 days ago [-]
You appear to be equating guarding stock with exterminating species, and further making a sweeping generalisation about all(?) landholders "going after badgers".
When I answered your question above I was pretty specific in the wording, perhaps you're letting some personal PoV read to much into what others are saying.
Razengan 22 hours ago [-]
The badgers issue is unrelated to the wolves, but it’s the same thing of humans being cunts to animals
defrost 14 hours ago [-]
Are all your positions re: humans and animals blunt and lacking nuance, experience and comprehension?
Do you have, for example, any thoughts on conservation and the dynamics between native humans, self introduced humans, endangered bilbies, dingos, introduced feral cats and foxes?
> For the people who don't know, there weren't wild wolves up to 2015.
Well, if you go further back in time, there were. It's not like introducing a nonnative species.
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
you have to go back more than 100 years, but fair.
In those 100 years the rest of the environment changed, it's a bit of an experiment right to reintroduce it without having contingency plan if things go wrong, because shooting them if they are too aggressive is not allowed, unless they're marked as 'problem wolf'.
yorwba 22 hours ago [-]
Declaring them a problem and then shooting them is the contingency plan.
hbogert 7 hours ago [-]
One of the criteria to be a problem wolf is to have wandered on a kids playground twice.
I think that's idiotic that the line is drawn only in cases like that
barrakip 5 hours ago [-]
you're arguing in bad faith. That is one of the criteria, but there are others too. And a wolf can qualify on those other criteria alone as well.
holgerschurig 9 hours ago [-]
Ah, nice, a new Boris Johnson. He was known to spread as many lies as possible about the EU when he was a journalist in Bruxelles.
"Ah yes the nice EU experiment" is in a similar vein. I mean, the opposite is true, the EU parliament made it EASIER to shot wolfs:
The first link is about the EU commission AFAIK the council of EU (not sure about the english term. I mean the gremium where representatives of the EU governments meet and decide on matters).
And the 2nd about the EU parliament.
So we have 3 different EU bodies work against the natural spread of wolfs.
ItsYan 1 days ago [-]
Surely there are benefits to this. What are they? Could you provide a steel man of the opposition, please?
tormeh 1 days ago [-]
Population control, preventing overgrazing, stuff like that. However, the Netherlands (unlike most countries) is basically a big farm with practically no wild nature, so humans manage that stuff already. Maybe I'm exaggerating a tad, but I don't get what benefit wolves have in the Netherlands specifically.
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
The promise that the ecosystem would manage itself and wolves would just pick the least fit of the herd. It's shown they just like to kill for the thrill. There are cases of 30 sheeps per night in one site.
'Just Place fences' is a common heard thing, however wolves are smart and will just jump over or dig underneath. If you want to make a proper barrier with concrete is just practically unaffordable for the farmers.
milch 1 days ago [-]
Livestock guardian dogs and other methods are common around the world where predators still exist in the environment. Why can't the Dutch use them?
hcfman 7 hours ago [-]
They do. But not in large numbers. They are not cheap, take a long time to train and come with maintenance I understand. But apparently they work very well.
lovich 21 hours ago [-]
Sounds like yall should implement something like this
Although a quick googling appears to show that there is a compensation scheme in place for livestock killed by wolves, although I see a lot of commentary on it being insufficient.
tourmalinetaco 1 days ago [-]
To the average Dutchy? Not much. To the average European? Also not much. Animal preservation is well and good and all but anything wolves can do for the deer population humans can do. Though Idk how it is in NL, but wild boars are nasty fuckers and we do good to keep them down, so there might be some benefit there, though not sure if damage by boars if offset by damage by wolves.
KaiserPro 1 days ago [-]
Its larger animal control.
Wildboars can be quite destructive, as are deers. the wolve was the natural preditor of those animals so the only thing that kept them in check was either hunting, disease or food availability.
In the UK deer over population is a problem for forestry as they eat saplings. So we spend a lot of cash hunting them (good food source, but not widely distributed in shops) Wolves stop that.
For the netherlands sspecifically, where there are deer they eat the trees that provide bank stability (ie willows) Less of a problem now but they also eat the pioneer species that were used to build polders.
Deer carry disease for cattle and sheep as well. although cows in holland are fairly hemmed in, ticks and fleas are less so.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
Everyone wants wolves except the people who have to actually live with them.
forty 1 days ago [-]
I'm not sure the wolves actually want to live with those people either but no one is suggesting to eradicate those people.
lifestyleguru 1 days ago [-]
Honestly wolves work with smell and will actively avoid humans. Opposite to domesticated dogs which at the sight of a human will bark at a human and oftentimes attack. Having lived in multiple regions in Europe with statistical presence of wolves I have zero encounters with wolves and dozens of occurrences where domesticated dog was barking at me or chasing me.
pvaldes 5 hours ago [-]
Is a nice slogan but a hollowed one also
There are thousands of millions of people that live with wolves in their houses. And they massively love the experience and claim that it improves their lives. Wolves and dogs are the same species. This means also that wolves are the animal that saved more human lives, by a mile, after humans.
----- but you referred to the wild big bad wolf... Okay
Wolves are shy and don't attack humans if they can avoid it
Registered wolves attacks on people in the last 100 years are not zero. Wolves are the only wild terrestrial animal in the Western countries that would deliberately help, adopt and feed a lost children in distress, so is a negative value and should be expressed as "X people saved by wolves this decade.
Wolves save lives in other ways also. Drivers will see their risk to die in a car crash against a wild boar, a dog or a deer drastically reduced. See "ecology of fear".
And they chase off feral dogs that in fact do attack humans each year.
-----
Wolves protect cattle and people from disease
Not catching Lyme disease is a good thing
Dutch parents will appreciate also that the cheese and milk that his children consume is free from bovine tuberculosis.
Netherlands is free from the disease but in can reenter at any time. In 2026 four people in the Netherlands suffered the disease.
Farmers fear bovine tuberculosis. One positive means your farm being quarantined and forbidden to sell dairy or meat for an indefinite time. Often having to sacrifice and dump every one of your cows. The air transmission from animal to human is also possible and the disease is not easy to detect in their first stages.
The return of the wolves to Netherlands adds a new layer of protection. They will take good care of assuring that the wildlife does not get the disease.
And before you reply with: "but distemper", rabies is a problem technically solved long time ago in developed countries. Meat baits and an helicopter will grant you that every fox, ferret and wolf in the area will get its vaccine. Poland and Austria do this since 80's with stellar results.
-----------------
Wolves benefit hunters
A well documented effect of wolves on the populations of their preys is a drastic improvement in the size and quality of deer trophies by genetic selection when wolves appear. Hunters find desirable having bigger and healthier deer, so wolves provide a valuable service.
"But wolves in my area will ate 150 deer this year!", yep they will do.
Lets imagine that I offer you to choose between two options. I will offer you 10000 dollars, but you can keep the first 150, and then we will trow a dice with a 1% of probability of earning the other 9850 dollars.
Or I will give you "only 9850 dollars" and you'll lose this nice 150 bucks forever.
What option would you choose?
Hunters choose the same. Each time wolves had been extirpated from an area, soon epidemics appeared to decimate the deer population and killing, not hundreds, thousands or tens thousands of deer. It happened in Spain on 2022. It happens all the time.
Also if you think that removing the wolves will stop the attacks to cattle, think again. Is guaranteed, and has been proven several times, that it will increase the attacks.
----------------
Alive wolves may be a touristic resource.
Since 1970 wolf reintroduction, places around Yellowstone started to notice millions of dollars extra each year, because wolves are the only big carnivore in the area that uses the day to frolic in open spaces all around the year (bears sleep for months and cougars are elusive and nocturnal). Tourists love to watch wolves from a safe distance, and travel from far away to see them. Wolves are a touristic magnet.
----------------
Wolves will benefit the huge sector of agriculture and ornamental plants in Holland.
Tulip breeders will have less bulbs unearthed by wild boards. They should be happy about that.
Farmers will have fewer damages in their vegetable or cereal crops, and insurance companies will pay less by those.
Is the damage done on cattle more than the money earned or saved by all the other wolf services?
I doubt it, but farmers can pay anytime they want to remove bovine tuberculosis, screwworms, etc, etc, from each deer and wild boar in the country. If they create the problem by not allowing wolves in the place, maybe they should fix it with their own time and money instead to tax other for that.
I never found a politician that will frown upon the idea of saving taxes in disease cleaning campaigns or forest restoration, because wolves to this for free and those taxes can be used now in other things.
-------------
I assure you that a lot of the people that live with wolves don't have any problem with being safer, richer and healthier
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
Maybe they're saying that there are better ways to coexist with animals that were here before us, before we razed their forests, than, you know, genocide
Scarblac 1 days ago [-]
Primarily because sheep owners refuse to install good fences.
XRG 1 days ago [-]
That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems. They also jump surprisingly high. Moreover, once they manage to cross a fence they do not kill to feed. Instead, they slaughter entire herds of sheep for the sport of it. I personally think wolves are incredible animals, but their sudden reintroduction in the Netherlands feels ill thought out.
Someone 1 days ago [-]
> but their sudden reintroduction in the Netherlands feels ill thought out.
I don’t think it was a reintroduction, nor was it sudden.
AFAIK, they came back on their own accord, and their return was fairly slowly, after wolves returned to western Germany.
“In a paper published in 2016, “The first proof of the recent presence of Wolves in the Netherlands,” authors wrote:
“In light of the expansion of wolves from the Polish border to the northwest of Germany and the sightings in Denmark, the appearance of the wolf in the Netherlands was no surprise to most experts. In March 2015, this expectation was fulfilled when, after generations without resident wolves, a single wolf wandered through the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen in broad daylight. From 7 to 10 March 2015, the Netherlands witnessed the comeback of an iconic species.”
Since 2019, the country has once again become home to its first pack of wolves with young pups after 150 years. Genetic sampling revealed the Netherlands wolves came from an Alpine population and Central European populations (i.e. Germany)“
edwinjm 22 hours ago [-]
Their protection by law two years earlier in 2014 was “sudden”.
hcfman 6 hours ago [-]
Yes they can sometimes learn to jump high fences. And that particular incident could have been prevented if people were employing early warning detection systems.
Wolves don’t just encounter a farm and instantly jump over the fences. They would have been around for a significant period of time before doing that. And during that period they could have been detected and that attack prevented in all likelihood. This of course needs proper research but wolves are very cautious.
The wolf attack in question where a wolf jumped a fence 20 times could have been detected or cut short if an electronic detection system had been employed.
These systems have the potential to make a positive difference.
But these ways are not really being tried yet, 10 years later. We are not as adaptive as wolves it seems. Maybe that can change soon though.
I know, because I have developed such a system and studied a pack with it in Belgium the past year.
I captured wolves on video more than 60 times during that period. And in that period only 2x times were the wolves hanging around the farmers field which had horses (rather than simply passing by). I called the farmer and the wolves dispersed. The videos of this are also online.
The system uses thermal imaging and the University of Helsinki have incorporated the images into a thermally trained AI model. PIR sensors can detect wolves a relatively short distance away. But this system can detect wolves and label them as such at 50m or more.
Describing the slaughter as sport would not be accurate. The situation is an unnatural situation as the sheep have no way to escape. In a natural situation the prey would have had the opportunity to disperse.
If you try to break up a fight between domesticated dogs you would also note that they enter a different state of mind during such an attack. In these cases the trapped sheep just make the situation worse.
The fence however serves a very good purpose which in most cases would do its job. And in this particular case it’s also useful, it serves as a natural barrier to allow time for a detection system to detect the wolf and potentially invoke a response system. But it’s quite clear we need to adapt a little quicker ourselves, indeed our response was ill thought out.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems.
Pair the sheep and goat herds with one or two decent sheepdogs - Kangals/Karabaş, Ovcharka (in Slavic languages, ovce means sheep, so their purpose is literally their name) or similar large breeds. That is usually enough to drive off wolves to feed off of deer instead that are a true scourge for forestry when the hunters don't keep up.
throw310822 1 days ago [-]
Hmm. Well, not sure about this. If you put yourself in the shoes of the wolf, sheep are abundant, free, delicious everything- their "economy" is exclusively food-bound. Not sure what kind of fences would keep them out, and how expensive would they be- and how long they would last.
throw310822 1 days ago [-]
It's not just the Netherlands, this is happening in Italy as well. Part of it is just the natural consequence of people having abandoned the countryside and mountains for the cities. But we certainly forgot what it means to not be the only apex predator around- we used to be able to roam around without a fear in the world like we owned the fucking place (we did). It's nice to have a wild ecosystem around but we probably forgot what it means to have around beings that are... unaligned with us.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
Speaking as a non urban northern Australian .. I'm guessing that's very much a European "we"?
It applies in more places that are heavily anthropized, such as many islands.
But yeah, most of Europe is practically a garden.
tourmalinetaco 1 days ago [-]
Absolutely an American and European “we”, you Aussies play on hard mode. Your closest natural deer analogue (kangaroos) looks like it served time for assault and didn’t learn its lesson, and it seems like a new poisonous animal is discovered every other week.
saberience 1 days ago [-]
Oh no, the poor sheep!
Why are sheep so important to protect versus wolves? They are both animals that existed in nature and can continue to exist in nature.
Why should we be morally inclined to try and "save" sheep at the expense of wolves. Sheep and goats and deer survived throughout history without the help of humans they will continue to exist, with or without the help of humans against wolves.
KaiserPro 1 days ago [-]
Its not morals, it cost.
Sheep are a cash animal, and wolves taking them cost money.
pvaldes 19 hours ago [-]
Forests are a cash plant, and sheep taking them cost money, and wolves taking sheep save money, and humans taking wolves cost money.
emsign 1 days ago [-]
It's always bout the monies. Always. And about the evil EU. EU is only good as long as it gives subsidiary monies, but we don't mention that. Never. We only take and moan.
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
What a caricature of the 'we'.
You almost always get 'something' from your government even if i want it or not, call it subsidiaries or not, the moment i do, i forego my right to complain?
I indeed have an issue with rules enforced on EU level, which seem great on paper, but have negative implications on local level. Course correction takes ages. This is the typical distance to power concept.
mannycalavera42 1 days ago [-]
sorry but I think you are not considering history and data here... sheep and goats were selectively bred by humans and often cannot survive without us. Modern (domestic) sheep and goats are veeeery different from their wild ancestors (e.g. traits vital for wild survival got removed). The idea that "they survived history, they will survive forever" is a classic logical fallacy. Many species survived for millions of years right up until rapid environmental shifts/new pressures drove them to extinction (e.g. see the pyrenean ibex). Moreso: modern habitats have little resemblance to historical ones. Wild deer/goats/sheeps evolved in vast, connected ecosystems! With human development (highways/agricultural fencing/climate change) today we have severely fragmented habitats: natural migration routes are no longer there. So a lot of these "survived thorughtout history" animals can get easily squared / hunted down
isoprophlex 1 days ago [-]
yes for the love of god would someone please make sure the country remains a safe, boring holiday park / dairy farm. will someone think of all that poor livestock / the children!!1
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
Well I guess we differ there then, I do like not having to carry a rifle or sprays when i walk outside (we are not allowed). I also like livestock and kids not having to fear a predator that we drove to the outskirts.
I do wonder where you live in the Netherlands and if you just find it convenient to talk about the rural parts without having to face the consequences.
ongediertebestr 1 days ago [-]
This is everything wrong with the netherlands. The over the top complaining of the “farmers” (factory operator would be more accurate).
Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves. The whole anti wolf movement is just propaganda by the “farmers”.
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
Very demeaning way of people making their livelihood.
> Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves.
No they don't always stay away, plenty of confirmed stories.
Just because there's no deaths yet, does it mean you can continue until it does happen? People have already been attacked.
derriz 1 days ago [-]
Wolves generally don't attack people, though, do they?
There are no recent (last half century) documented cases of wolves killing people in Europe as far as I know. The few times people have been bitten by wolves they've been feeding them or doing other stupid stuff.
Freak_NL 1 days ago [-]
Nope. The basic rule is that you don't do things with wolves you shouldn't do (like feeding them and thus gradually letting them get comfortable around humans), and that you don't do boneheaded shit like leaving a small child alone in nature (which is common sense in most of the world). For a wolf a three year old child is just about the same as a boar or small deer.
Anyone over the age of 12 though? Wolves won't bother you unless you've managed to fuck up nature to such an extent that they can't find their usual diet (deer, boar, etc.), and even then attacking an adult is really desperate.
There was an interesting interview with an Italian expert about wolves and people in the news this week:
Well it's easy to have zero wolf attacks when there are zero wolves. We also have zero hyena attacks.
pvaldes 18 hours ago [-]
There are more than zero wolves in many places of Europe.
AlotOfReading 21 hours ago [-]
As someone who lives in a country with wolves and other apex canids (to the point where we have legal hunting seasons for them), I really don't understand the supposed "consequences" here. Canid populations just aren't an issue. There are no children living in fear (rather, we have to keep kids from trying to approach the cute animals...), nor are the occasional depredation events more than a minor annoyance. If a wolf or big cat in particular eats your lifestock, you file a form with the government for market-value compensation and complain about the hassle at the bar.
CorbenDallas 1 days ago [-]
"safe and boring holiday park" sounds like a sentence for a country.
ShinyLeftPad 1 days ago [-]
> sentence for a country
Sure... It's a developed productive high tech country with agricultural exports leaving Russia in the dust despite 400 times smaller land size, but let's condemn it because it's "safe"
Also ask the farmers, fishers, ASML employees, the police dealing with gang killings and Netherlands being the biggest exporter of ecstasy and European gateway for coke how it's a "holiday park";)
gostsamo 1 days ago [-]
NL has the biggest port in Europe, they get to be the biggest traffic channel for illegal goods. The only one who could've changed that would've been the one to eestablish the country there.
ShinyLeftPad 1 days ago [-]
i mean singapore port handles way more traffic... but then it has very strict anti drug laws
also ecstasy is made there in NL, so the port thing is kind of a red herring
Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. It wad his first major piece of non-fiction.
RobotToaster 1 days ago [-]
> The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue.
Really not helping their reputation as authoritarian...
gvfsa 1 days ago [-]
Beep beep! We have detected your mild criticism of the EU and have applied the necessary downvotes. Have a nice day!
hbogert 1 days ago [-]
Oh don't get me wrong, I like the EU for many things, but course correcting is not its strong suit.
asanineassasin 1 days ago [-]
Introducing the concept of the "scratchpost" to nature lovers.
If im small and hunted, why does it help me to know predators nearby who do not hunt me- and to take predators chasing me, to them, so they get eaten? Because survival means, if i have a scratchpost, i can get rid of them.
So what is a village of humans- not allowed to hunt me near houses, with driving cars- other then a predator scratchpost. Bonuspoints if the disney-hystrics install dart guns to sedate the predators.
Also look at those boars and deer. They are massive. Are you really sure, a creature whose culture changes on a yearly basis, will not try to attack a weak human, compared to a wild boar, when hunger bites in the winter?
now that they're back, eg. wild boar are seen congegating in groups of 50-60 animals, for herd safety. something they never did before.
Edit: this linked, translated article has more info https://nos-nl.translate.goog/artikel/2635314-wolf-maakt-zwi...
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ya9E9NG-riE?si=1Rqs07kZ1MzY7_Mh
I'm also in Berlin, have been woken up by them in the night, looked out the window and watched them barge right through a neighbour's gate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b-m9WxW6VM
it feels a bit hateful to chalk it up to the dialect of english, as if the commenter is simply stupid
That error was entirely your own, and a conscious one, unlike what you were commenting on.
Tens of thousands of years ago, lions existed in much of Europe, Asia and North-America, but they became extinct, either because their prey was hunted more successfully by humans, or by being directly hunted by humans, especially when the latter began to have herds of domestic animals and they wanted to eliminate the predators that could endanger them.
In several cases where for a long time it was thought that some statements of Herodotus were false more recent research has shown that they were actually true. In some cases some statements of Herodotus seemed false due to mistranslations, e.g. where it was thought that he described some kind of giant ants, but those were in fact marmots (i.e. rodents) of normal size.
So I do not think that he deserves to be called "father of lies".
Many more recent historians have been much more biased politically, so one must read their works very carefully to distinguish facts from propaganda.
This is especially true for many very recent historians of the 20th and 21st century, many of whom deserve to be called liars much, much more than Herodotus and even than the most biased historians from the Antiquity.
Not long afterwards, all Pigeons started hiding and you do not see many just hanging around. One favorite place is under bridges. Shows animals will learn real fast to avoid threats :)
Rhetoric questions by proponents as seen on national news website[1]:
> We hebben ook weleens last van de mens, die schieten we toch ook niet af?
> -- Aaldrik Pot
Translated:
"We also have issues with people every now and then, were not shooting them are we?"
[1]: https://nos.nl/artikel/2245512-waarom-willen-we-eigenlijk-wi...
Wolf numbers are now reportedly at 131 split across roughly 14 packs (April 2026): https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/11/dutch-wolf-population-growing-...
I have zero insight into why Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands concluded in a study that "the Netherlands are legally required to contribute between 23 and 56 wolf packs" (Lost in translation? - perhaps "can support and shouldn't cull below these numbers" ?)
~ https://www.wur.nl/en/news/ecological-and-legal-framework-wo...
Reading further:
https://edepot.wur.nl/690748
It seems that this is part of a european "habitats directive" for managing biodiversity within Europe. This directive (according to the above paper) determined there need to be around 500 wolf packs across Europe to keep wolves at a stable level without too much inbreeding. The Netherlands was found to be able to "contribute" 23 to 56 wolf packs in this sense.
(Edit, this is an april fools, shit)
the official position is: https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500453124/
Which given how much of the private land in scotland is owned for deer or grouse shooting, that seems logical.
Your link might have been wishful thinking by the wilderness society boosting an unconfirmed hearsay, or perhaps it was true but the few wolves mentioned didn't flourish.
eg: (2025) - Scientists want to release 160 wolves in Scotland... https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/uk-160-wol...
Actually in Kent there's a park where they are reintroducing European Bison, and alongside them some Elk. I mean it is a fenced off area experiment.
There are so many deer around here now, they're asking people to hunt them and trying to start a taste for venison.
If those were private sheep, shouldn't they be better guarded?
That's somewhat distinct from going further beyond their boundaries to wipe out threats not directly on their land.
In the UK we've not had wolves for >200 years. Which means techniques for dealing with them have been lost, and more importantly didn't evolve with land use change. hearders used to carry weapons, and guard dogs. some places had fainting goats.
I'm not sure how wolves would work in the netherlands, as the parts that I know are all way west of the ijssel. I don't imagine that wolves are fen/polder dwellers, but I might be wrong. Again looking at the norfolk/cambridge fens there are plenty of folklore tales https://www.norfolkfolkloresociety.co.uk/post/the-spectral-w...
When I answered your question above I was pretty specific in the wording, perhaps you're letting some personal PoV read to much into what others are saying.
Do you have, for example, any thoughts on conservation and the dynamics between native humans, self introduced humans, endangered bilbies, dingos, introduced feral cats and foxes?
~ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-17/research-project-ding...
Well, if you go further back in time, there were. It's not like introducing a nonnative species.
In those 100 years the rest of the environment changed, it's a bit of an experiment right to reintroduce it without having contingency plan if things go wrong, because shooting them if they are too aggressive is not allowed, unless they're marked as 'problem wolf'.
I think that's idiotic that the line is drawn only in cases like that
"Ah yes the nice EU experiment" is in a similar vein. I mean, the opposite is true, the EU parliament made it EASIER to shot wolfs:
* https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/woelfe-abschuss-eu-.... * https://www.bmleh.de/SharedDocs/Meldungen/DE/Presse/2025/250...
The first link is about the EU commission AFAIK the council of EU (not sure about the english term. I mean the gremium where representatives of the EU governments meet and decide on matters).
And the 2nd about the EU parliament.
So we have 3 different EU bodies work against the natural spread of wolfs.
https://www.fws.gov/service/wolf-livestock-loss-demonstratio...
Although a quick googling appears to show that there is a compensation scheme in place for livestock killed by wolves, although I see a lot of commentary on it being insufficient.
Wildboars can be quite destructive, as are deers. the wolve was the natural preditor of those animals so the only thing that kept them in check was either hunting, disease or food availability.
In the UK deer over population is a problem for forestry as they eat saplings. So we spend a lot of cash hunting them (good food source, but not widely distributed in shops) Wolves stop that.
For the netherlands sspecifically, where there are deer they eat the trees that provide bank stability (ie willows) Less of a problem now but they also eat the pioneer species that were used to build polders.
Deer carry disease for cattle and sheep as well. although cows in holland are fairly hemmed in, ticks and fleas are less so.
There are thousands of millions of people that live with wolves in their houses. And they massively love the experience and claim that it improves their lives. Wolves and dogs are the same species. This means also that wolves are the animal that saved more human lives, by a mile, after humans.
----- but you referred to the wild big bad wolf... Okay
Wolves are shy and don't attack humans if they can avoid it
Registered wolves attacks on people in the last 100 years are not zero. Wolves are the only wild terrestrial animal in the Western countries that would deliberately help, adopt and feed a lost children in distress, so is a negative value and should be expressed as "X people saved by wolves this decade.
Wolves save lives in other ways also. Drivers will see their risk to die in a car crash against a wild boar, a dog or a deer drastically reduced. See "ecology of fear".
And they chase off feral dogs that in fact do attack humans each year.
-----
Wolves protect cattle and people from disease
Not catching Lyme disease is a good thing
Dutch parents will appreciate also that the cheese and milk that his children consume is free from bovine tuberculosis.
Netherlands is free from the disease but in can reenter at any time. In 2026 four people in the Netherlands suffered the disease.
Farmers fear bovine tuberculosis. One positive means your farm being quarantined and forbidden to sell dairy or meat for an indefinite time. Often having to sacrifice and dump every one of your cows. The air transmission from animal to human is also possible and the disease is not easy to detect in their first stages.
The return of the wolves to Netherlands adds a new layer of protection. They will take good care of assuring that the wildlife does not get the disease.
And before you reply with: "but distemper", rabies is a problem technically solved long time ago in developed countries. Meat baits and an helicopter will grant you that every fox, ferret and wolf in the area will get its vaccine. Poland and Austria do this since 80's with stellar results.
-----------------
Wolves benefit hunters
A well documented effect of wolves on the populations of their preys is a drastic improvement in the size and quality of deer trophies by genetic selection when wolves appear. Hunters find desirable having bigger and healthier deer, so wolves provide a valuable service.
"But wolves in my area will ate 150 deer this year!", yep they will do.
Lets imagine that I offer you to choose between two options. I will offer you 10000 dollars, but you can keep the first 150, and then we will trow a dice with a 1% of probability of earning the other 9850 dollars.
Or I will give you "only 9850 dollars" and you'll lose this nice 150 bucks forever.
What option would you choose?
Hunters choose the same. Each time wolves had been extirpated from an area, soon epidemics appeared to decimate the deer population and killing, not hundreds, thousands or tens thousands of deer. It happened in Spain on 2022. It happens all the time.
Also if you think that removing the wolves will stop the attacks to cattle, think again. Is guaranteed, and has been proven several times, that it will increase the attacks.
----------------
Alive wolves may be a touristic resource.
Since 1970 wolf reintroduction, places around Yellowstone started to notice millions of dollars extra each year, because wolves are the only big carnivore in the area that uses the day to frolic in open spaces all around the year (bears sleep for months and cougars are elusive and nocturnal). Tourists love to watch wolves from a safe distance, and travel from far away to see them. Wolves are a touristic magnet.
----------------
Wolves will benefit the huge sector of agriculture and ornamental plants in Holland.
Tulip breeders will have less bulbs unearthed by wild boards. They should be happy about that.
Farmers will have fewer damages in their vegetable or cereal crops, and insurance companies will pay less by those.
Is the damage done on cattle more than the money earned or saved by all the other wolf services?
I doubt it, but farmers can pay anytime they want to remove bovine tuberculosis, screwworms, etc, etc, from each deer and wild boar in the country. If they create the problem by not allowing wolves in the place, maybe they should fix it with their own time and money instead to tax other for that.
I never found a politician that will frown upon the idea of saving taxes in disease cleaning campaigns or forest restoration, because wolves to this for free and those taxes can be used now in other things.
-------------
I assure you that a lot of the people that live with wolves don't have any problem with being safer, richer and healthier
I don’t think it was a reintroduction, nor was it sudden.
AFAIK, they came back on their own accord, and their return was fairly slowly, after wolves returned to western Germany.
https://wolf.org/wow/europe/netherlands/:
“In a paper published in 2016, “The first proof of the recent presence of Wolves in the Netherlands,” authors wrote:
“In light of the expansion of wolves from the Polish border to the northwest of Germany and the sightings in Denmark, the appearance of the wolf in the Netherlands was no surprise to most experts. In March 2015, this expectation was fulfilled when, after generations without resident wolves, a single wolf wandered through the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen in broad daylight. From 7 to 10 March 2015, the Netherlands witnessed the comeback of an iconic species.”
Since 2019, the country has once again become home to its first pack of wolves with young pups after 150 years. Genetic sampling revealed the Netherlands wolves came from an Alpine population and Central European populations (i.e. Germany)“
Wolves don’t just encounter a farm and instantly jump over the fences. They would have been around for a significant period of time before doing that. And during that period they could have been detected and that attack prevented in all likelihood. This of course needs proper research but wolves are very cautious.
The wolf attack in question where a wolf jumped a fence 20 times could have been detected or cut short if an electronic detection system had been employed.
These systems have the potential to make a positive difference.
But these ways are not really being tried yet, 10 years later. We are not as adaptive as wolves it seems. Maybe that can change soon though.
I know, because I have developed such a system and studied a pack with it in Belgium the past year.
The most videos are on this channel
https://youtube.com/@hcftube1
I captured wolves on video more than 60 times during that period. And in that period only 2x times were the wolves hanging around the farmers field which had horses (rather than simply passing by). I called the farmer and the wolves dispersed. The videos of this are also online.
The system uses thermal imaging and the University of Helsinki have incorporated the images into a thermally trained AI model. PIR sensors can detect wolves a relatively short distance away. But this system can detect wolves and label them as such at 50m or more.
Here are some project details
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/projects/wolves-belg...
And some more about the model Helsinki University developed here
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/projects/lammi/
Describing the slaughter as sport would not be accurate. The situation is an unnatural situation as the sheep have no way to escape. In a natural situation the prey would have had the opportunity to disperse.
If you try to break up a fight between domesticated dogs you would also note that they enter a different state of mind during such an attack. In these cases the trapped sheep just make the situation worse.
The fence however serves a very good purpose which in most cases would do its job. And in this particular case it’s also useful, it serves as a natural barrier to allow time for a detection system to detect the wolf and potentially invoke a response system. But it’s quite clear we need to adapt a little quicker ourselves, indeed our response was ill thought out.
Pair the sheep and goat herds with one or two decent sheepdogs - Kangals/Karabaş, Ovcharka (in Slavic languages, ovce means sheep, so their purpose is literally their name) or similar large breeds. That is usually enough to drive off wolves to feed off of deer instead that are a true scourge for forestry when the hunters don't keep up.
Here we're still surrounded by wild ecosystems and unaligned others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA3SuHtCWo0
It applies in more places that are heavily anthropized, such as many islands.
But yeah, most of Europe is practically a garden.
Why are sheep so important to protect versus wolves? They are both animals that existed in nature and can continue to exist in nature.
Why should we be morally inclined to try and "save" sheep at the expense of wolves. Sheep and goats and deer survived throughout history without the help of humans they will continue to exist, with or without the help of humans against wolves.
Sheep are a cash animal, and wolves taking them cost money.
You almost always get 'something' from your government even if i want it or not, call it subsidiaries or not, the moment i do, i forego my right to complain?
I indeed have an issue with rules enforced on EU level, which seem great on paper, but have negative implications on local level. Course correction takes ages. This is the typical distance to power concept.
I do wonder where you live in the Netherlands and if you just find it convenient to talk about the rural parts without having to face the consequences.
Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves. The whole anti wolf movement is just propaganda by the “farmers”.
> Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves.
No they don't always stay away, plenty of confirmed stories. Just because there's no deaths yet, does it mean you can continue until it does happen? People have already been attacked.
There are no recent (last half century) documented cases of wolves killing people in Europe as far as I know. The few times people have been bitten by wolves they've been feeding them or doing other stupid stuff.
Anyone over the age of 12 though? Wolves won't bother you unless you've managed to fuck up nature to such an extent that they can't find their usual diet (deer, boar, etc.), and even then attacking an adult is really desperate.
There was an interesting interview with an Italian expert about wolves and people in the news this week:
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/10/15/we-zullen-moeten-wennen...
Sure... It's a developed productive high tech country with agricultural exports leaving Russia in the dust despite 400 times smaller land size, but let's condemn it because it's "safe"
Also ask the farmers, fishers, ASML employees, the police dealing with gang killings and Netherlands being the biggest exporter of ecstasy and European gateway for coke how it's a "holiday park";)
also ecstasy is made there in NL, so the port thing is kind of a red herring
Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. It wad his first major piece of non-fiction.
Really not helping their reputation as authoritarian...
So what is a village of humans- not allowed to hunt me near houses, with driving cars- other then a predator scratchpost. Bonuspoints if the disney-hystrics install dart guns to sedate the predators.
Also look at those boars and deer. They are massive. Are you really sure, a creature whose culture changes on a yearly basis, will not try to attack a weak human, compared to a wild boar, when hunger bites in the winter?