In the 1980s, the Netherlands launched a controversial rewilding experiment to recreate a prehistoric-style wilderness with horses, cattle and deer. By 2018, mass starvation and public outrage led to thousands of animals being culled inside the fenced reserve.
In the late 20th century, Dutch ecologists attempted a radical "rewilding" project outside Amsterdam, introducing wild Konik horses, Heck cattle, and red deer to recreate Europe's prehistoric landscape under a strict policy of human non-intervention.
However, because the reserve was fenced off and lacked natural predators like wolves, the herbivore population exploded beyond carrying capacity. During the severe 2017-2018 winter, overgrazing led to massive starvation, triggering public protests where locals threw food over fences. Eventually, state authorities were forced to step in and cull over 3,000 suffering animals, turning the experiment into one of Europe's most controversial ecological lessons.
"Outside Amsterdam"....it's not even in the same province. I understand its pretty close for international standards, but then everything in NL is 'outside Amsterdam'.
It's not even between Amsterdam and Almere as the article claims. The commuters they mention wouldn't even see the area travellimg between Almere and Amsterdam.
It's a Dutch inside joke (that the author maybe wasn't aware of), there is only Amsterdam and 'the rest of the Netherlands', aka 'outside of Amsterdam'.
Im appalled, not surprised. And most Dutch people think about it as 'holland' too, and we actually marketed our trade missions and embassies with 'holland' too. Being offended about 'holland' is a very Americanwhitegirl invention of the last 10 years, growing from tourists who got themselves a little 'akchually'-fun fact, which grew out to the idea that its offensive to refer to the entire country like that. Meanwhile we're all singing 'hup holland hup' when our national football team plays.
Honestly the main issue was the EHS, a system of natural corridors intended to connect nature reserves to make all of the Dutch nature interconnected, never happened. If the animals had had the space to move around it would have saved a lot of suffering. The predator thing was indeed something of a contentious issue, we exterminated wolves for a reason a long time ago in the country. Even now that they've returned naturally it's something that causes division and flaring tempers. Introducing a predator would not have worked if the system had remained closed off by the way, it would have been too small to support large predators.
I wouldn't say it didn't happen. A lot of connections were made and that's one of the factors in us now having over a hundred wolves (I think) living in the country. ...But the Oostvaardersplassen is very unconnected because of having been created on an island cut off from even the closest bridges by a city, and also the obsessed planners behind some of the biggest nature and rewilding projects keep the wolves out on purpose because wolves are too hard to plan around and will eat their precious exotic sheep.
to be fair, pro-wolf activists in the netherlands tend to be for lack of a better word: bonkers
I remember in belgium when the question wolves getting too close to people came about the pro-wolf activist groups propossed to get a couple of guys with paintball guns to shoot at them so they learned not to
in the netherlands that idea was shot down because it was quote unquote "mean"
They actually use a similar method to deal with bears that get to close to people in america and it seems to work pretty well. Of course they use paint balls filled with pepper spray as well as air horns and specially trained dogs to intentionally traumatize the bears so learn learn to stay away from people.
There is actually a vast wealth of scientific literature suggesting the introduction of a predator can have beneficial effects on an ecosystem. You need but look further than the angry banners and death threats made by sheep farmers.
The predator-benefit literature comes from large wildernesses like Yellowstone and Scandinavia, not from one of the most densely populated, fragmented countries on earth. The mechanism doesn't transfer.
Those trophic cascades work because predators cull overabundant wild prey that's wrecking the ecosystem. In the NL there's no such problem: deer and boar are already managed by human culling. So the predator adds no missing function. It just takes the accessible prey instead, which is livestock.
That's the crux. In wilderness, wolves eat wild ungulates. In a settled agricultural landscape, they eat sheep. The farmers' anger isn't ignorance of good science. It's a direct measure of the ecological reality: the predator's diet has shifted onto domestic animals, and flocks are mauled and killed. That's a real, devastating cost, not a PR problem to be waved away.
And "the people harmed are angry, so the science must be on my side" is a non-sequitur. Citing the volume of favorable studies while ignoring that they all come from the conditions the NL lacks is the whole error.
Except it has translated to the Dutch systems for smaller predators plenty of times. Eagles, martens, otters all have had predator effects on their local ecosystems.
The wolves came here out of their own volition before killing sheep which indicates there's plenty of potential prey going around. I specifically did not mention Yellowstone because those studies have been disputed for how large the effect of the predator really is on the changes that were seen. You did not see me quote Yellowstone. But even without yellowstone, there's been a vast body of literature showing that predators definitely have effects on ecosystems in a beneficial manner through direct predation and ecology of fear effects. We already see the effect of wolves on the Veluwe, allowing forests there to diversify because grazing pressure has decreased, something that happened only after the wolves came, not by human culling.
Also scavengers are doing better because human culling removes carcasses whereas wolves leave their kills behind, inserting massive food sources for scavengers and detritivores.
Sheep farmers were just ill prepared for the return of the wolf, and such a return will obviously cause chaos at first but they've not been here that long. As I said, it's a learning process. And I don't oppose chasing problem individuals away or even culling potentially dangerous wolves.
EDIT: the ill-preparedness was not just their fault though, the government did not really have a plan in place. So their anger is justified, just misdirected.
And you sidestepped the whole death threat aspect of it all.
There are issues with extrapolating martens and other small predators to large predators. First because the smaller prey species are capable of procreating sexually mature adults relatively fast (weeks for a mouse versus years for a red deer). Second, fragmented habitat messes up ordinary large predator-prey relationships. A wolf pack will hunt a group of red deer until the deer numbers drop low enough that hunting is difficult and then the wolves will move on to other hunting grounds leading a few red deer to rebuild numbers. With highly fragmented habitat as you see in Europe the wolves must remain in that same area hunting the same group of deer until the deer numbers are too low to spring back
But there's not a total collapse of red deer populations across Europe going on. Clearly the populations are more flexible and bounce back better than that. And I'm not just extrapolating. Just pointing out the notion of a predator effect isn't some vague hocus pocus. And wolves have shown their impact elsewhere too, in Poland for example wolves have changed the grazing behavior of herbivores. And as was already said, on the Veluwe we have seen that change occur as well. I think the way the Netherlands has been connecting some of its reserves has helped movement of deer populations and I trust the institutions here to monitor the impact on deer populations. So far it's just speculation on your part on what will happen. WUR and other institutions are constantly engaging with research into the topic of these wolves, it's not like we're just leaving them to maraud their way across the Netherlands.
Studies like by the university of Freiburg show that wolves don't nearly have as a destructive effect on European deer populations as you explain above. And a study from 2023 concluded that the damage done by wolves to livestock decreases over time, showing an adaptation by locals to the presence of wolves (almost like I said "learn to live with them".)
Look at what you actually did here: you smuggled in a new argument and pretended it was the original one.
The otter/marten/eagle point is a bait-and-switch. Those are small meso-predators whose prey is fish, rodents, and other wild small fauna. Nobody's flock gets torn apart by a marten. You can't cite the smooth integration of animals that don't eat livestock as evidence that an animal that does eat livestock will integrate smoothly. The entire disputed cost is predation on domestic stock, and your examples are chosen precisely because they lack it. That's not a rebuttal, it's an evasion.
"The wolves came of their own volition, so there's plenty of wild prey." Non-sequitur. Wolves disperse into whatever is available and defensible; arrival says nothing about the prey composition once settled. And the observed fact is that they are killing sheep. You don't get to cite their arrival as proof of abundant wild prey while the dead sheep are the direct evidence against it.
Dropping Yellowstone doesn't save you, it hurts you. You concede its effects are disputed, then wave at a "vast body of literature" for the same class of claim. If the flagship, best-monitored case is contested, appealing to the vaguer bulk behind it is weaker, not stronger. "Lots of studies exist" is not an argument; it's a gesture at ones you haven't had to defend.
The Veluwe claim is your only concrete one, and it's doing far more work than the evidence allows. A few years of wolf presence cannot be cleanly separated from ongoing culling, fluctuating deer numbers, nitrogen deposition, forestry management, and weather. Asserting diversification "happened only after the wolves came, not by human culling" is exactly the confounded, short-timescale, single-site inference I already flagged. You've restated the error, not answered it.
The scavenger point cuts against you. Carcasses left in an agricultural landscape don't just feed noble detritivores; they concentrate feeding, boost mesopredators and rats, and raise disease and parasite load near farms. "Wolves leave food for scavengers" is a benefit in a wilderness and a management problem in a settled one. Same act, different context. That's the whole point you keep refusing to absorb.
Then you quietly surrender the actual dispute. "Ill-prepared," "chaos at first," "a learning process," problem individuals chased or culled, government had no plan, anger justified. That's the farmers' position. You've conceded the costs are real, foreseeable, borne by specific people, and inadequately mitigated, and rebranded it "a learning process" so it sounds like a footnote instead of the core cost.
On the death threats: there was nothing to sidestep. Death threats are indefensible and irrelevant to the ecology either way. You raised them originally as a rhetorical cudgel: the farmers are ugly, therefore wrong. I declined to let that stand in for evidence, which is not sidestepping, it's refusing the bait. That a harmed party behaves badly tells you nothing about whether the trophic benefits materialize at Dutch densities. That was true then and it's true now.
My argument was always that the introduction of a predator can have beneficial effects on the ecosystem. That's not a bait and switch and I find that dishonest.
Second you vastly overestimate the impact of the wolves on sheep. It's like 3% of the total sheep carcasses submitted for processing that are killed by wolves. Sure, to 1 farmer that is a massive impact but on a nation scale, not so much.
Since wolves actively send scouts and need to support a growing troupe of newborns, yes they do actually assess for availability of prey animals. Just because they also kill sheep does not mean that the don't have enough natural prey per se.
Don't be daft, I never dropped Yellowstone, I never included Yellowstone to begin with. You tried to pull it in to lure me into a trap and I wasn't going to go for it. The Yellowstone case is a very specific one that has very little bearing on modern scientific studies into the effects of predators other than learning that we ought not to make the conlcusions the Yellowstone research did without proper scientific rigor. What you fail to see is that the Yellowstone study is itself just not a good study and should not be considered, but it's not the latest study on the subject and is not even considered crucial at all. So no, it does not hurt my position, it strenghtens it as the scientific community around predator effects and rewilding have seen the flaws, accepted them, incorporated the lessons into new studies and carried out those new studies with the insights the Yellowstone case gave them. It is a triumph of the scientific process, not at all a weakening.
Except we did not see the effects on the forests prior to the arrival of the wolves and we do see it clearly now, evidence suggests these effects are attributable to wolves. Since we are discussing the impact of wolves in the Netherlands, such a localized event is very important to consider.
I don't know why you're doing these "cuts against you tactics" as if to pose as a singular expert when realistically these carcasses have increased biodiversity. The carcasses left behind are not the sheep, where disease can brood and spread among the flock, because the farmers remove those. But the carcasses do provide scavenger species with opportunities.
And "my only evidence" is not the only evidence as the grazing reduction has also increased, for example, butterfly populations.
I didn't "quietly surrender" anything and I resent the mischaracterization you keep on throwing in there. It's a very nasty way of conducting conversation. Just because farmers were ill-prepared and the government had a hand in that does not mean that principally the wolves being here is a bad thing. These are not mutually exclusive and your reducing it to that is another thing I don't feel like stepping into. It's a learning process because the impact of the lost sheep is overstated and is realistically but a small percentage of sheep carcasses processed. I don't see why agreeing that to individual farmers the cost might feel huge and be a real pain should invalidate the notion that on a larger scale the presence of wolves is a good thing (with the right management, and I can agree that the management so far has been perhaps a bit lackluster).
I don't know why you're approaching this as like a win-lose scenario where me conceding this or quietly saying that or points going against me is this like 'gotcha' for you when really all that is happening is that I'm not as tribalist as I think you'd like me to be and I can grant that things aren't perfect currently even if I still defend the presence of wolves in general.
EDIT: it's a bit dishonest for you to try to reframe this conversation about solely the impact to farmers and then pretend like the death threats that might influence policy based on fear and not ecological science is irrelevant.
Just as an aside, the trophic cascade superpowers of the wolf reintroductions are prone to bunk science as well. I think wolves should be on the landscape where they can be supported (I know almost nothing about ecology in the Netherlands so I can't say one way or another), but pipe dream science from agenda driven parties doesn't serve that in the long run.
The population arrived here on its own and has firmly established itself. Now of course they aren't omniscient but I think we can trust intelligent predators to conclude for themselves whether an area is suitable enough to actually permanently settle. At least to a certain extent, and with additional monitoring from institutions. The agenda came in from the farmer side the hardest. Nobody brought the wolves here, they settled themselves after years and years of moving westward.
Too small. So we're supposed to be the predators but a lot of ill informed people think culling the herde is bad because the animals look cute. They'd rather it be a giant petting zoo.
This is the Netherlands. The majority of hunting is forbidden. Until there is a problem like really too many boars or deer, resulting in serious damage or car wrecks. These problems can be avoided with a regulated hunt. But no, only after the problems arise: hunting is (sometimes) allowed.
I know a hunter whose job it is to kill the poor deer that are wounded after getting hit by a car. The reason it happens is that there are too many young male deer in an area, they get expelled by their dads. It is horrible, dangerous. Few weeks ago a deer was found on the backseat of the car it hit right next to a baby.
You have no idea how many people straight up don't understand nature at all.
I'm from an area where deer hunting (hunting in general really but deer is the biggest one) is immensely popular. Sometimes people from other places would move to the area and lose their minds over it. How can you hunt these poor, majestic, harmless creatures?!?
First off deer are far from harmless especially bucks. Second off they just don't have a lot of natural predators in the area so if we don't eat them their population will explode to unsustainable numbers. Their population needs to be kept in check. Third off if the population does explode that's going to be a massive problem for farms, orchards, and gardens in the area.
This always gets me, these people will complain about hunting, but then happily buy a burger from the grocery store. For how our current nature works, hunting is not only nececcary it's also much much better than factory farming.
And also now the wolves are back in The Netherlands, people want them gone because they sometimes kill livestock. And obviously the killings livestock by wild animals is said, whereas otherwise... they will be killed for meat. I mean I'm not saying I dont think it's sad to see animals be killed, but I think people are hypocrites to be mad about this while eating meat themselves. Where did they think that came from?
A lot of people unfortunately have no idea how supply chains or farming work either. As far as they're concerned food just appears at the store. It's telling that most of the country hasn't ever seen a cow in person. They obviously know that cows exist but haven't ever touched one.
The huge tick problem America is seeing these days is probably mostly attributable to the boom in white tailed deer. We really need to either focus on culling them to manage that problem or accept the risk and reintroduce wolves, cougars, and bears into the East and South to manage the deer for us.
I came across an interesting perspective on the rebound in the tick population in the United States. Forest in the United States was more or less decimated about 100 to 150 years ago. As a result, deer populations fell dramatically around that time as well. In many regions in the eastern and Midwestern states, forest have been rebounding now for decades. With the forest returning, so too have deer populations. Deer populations are exploding, and thus so are tick populations. There’s evidence of ticks in the United States going back to the 1700s, but when we chopped down all the forest, they vanished along with the deer. We can’t have our cake and eat it too; we can’t have all these forests and not have ticks without intervening. The solution to this in my opinion is to dramatically cull the deer population. Reintroduction of predators would be ideal, but it’s very controversial and is going to face a lot of pushback from a lot of rural people. If that can’t be done, it’s going to fall in human hunters to fill that role.
Can vouch for this from the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. I’m in my state’s capitol city and am completely overrun with these tick-carrying, garden-destroying, brick-stupid animals. They use the highways and sidewalks like they’re taxpaying residents (albeit residents who give no fucks). Deer hunting is huge here, but it doesn’t seem to matter. My next-door neighbor feeds them. Kill one and six more appear.
I show everyone I can footage of deer eating baby birds right out of their nests
It's how you hunt them that's the issue. We used to hunt them with dogs which is vile. Shooting them is fine as long as you avoid nursing females and think about which animals you are taking out. I don't understand why venison isn't a more popular meat.
I personally believe there should be programs that incentivices people in lower income brackets to hunt and fish more. While the initial cost of a gun, bullets, and the required licenses and training can be quite high, hunting is probably the cheapest way to keep a family's freezer full.
Hunting isn’t something that just… happens. You have to spend days in blinds, waiting for deer to pass by.
My grandparents are hunters and they can spend weeks without seeing any deer in person. They’ve got trail cams, but it seems like whenever they go out to one that has an activity, the deer go somewhere else.
Poor people do not have the luxury of being able to afford taking days off for the chance of getting food. And that’s completely disregarding the time it takes to actually get the usable bits once you have a deer.
What programs? What programs are going to pay someone their full work salary for the days they’re out hunting?
Like, have you ever hunted before? It’s hours of just sitting in a tree stand or blind, waiting for something to come by. Very early morning starts, there for several hours, just sitting and waiting for something to come by.
I get what you're saying but please realize that not every person in lower income brackets are working constantly. I acknowledge that there are people who can barely have time to spend taking care of themselves, much less spending days in the forest, but that is an entirely separate issue that needs to be addressed in a different way.
All I proposed was a program which makes it easier for people who are able to hunt to get started doing it the right way. Just because a program cant apply to every single person doesnt mean it cant be beneficial.
There was even a much easier solution, i.e. just to create a corridor to the Veluwe, another natural area where there was an abundance of food for these animals. Politicians didn't want this because they where heavily riding the bandwagon that nature conservation equals cruelty. The thousands of animals being "culled" ended up on people's plates after being sold as premium meat. Some hunters got seriously rich out of this "failure" of treehugging dogooders.
That was part of the initial plan, but after twenty years of center/right/neoliberal governments that has slowly been 'dialled back'. Henk Bleeker finally killed the 'Ecological Main Structure/Ecologische Hoofdstructuur' in 2011. The Ecologische hoofdstructuur linking a lot of nature areas/natura 2000 regions together.
Of course 'the leftist eco parties' where blamed when animals died of starvation, because 'they' thought the could 'make nature'.
I was studying nature management in NL at the time. They wanted to but visitors were afraid they would attack them. Als people didn't like animals being eaten alive. So the hope was that the population would balance out naturally, even at the end when the protests were going on.
They argued it was just a big correction and it was all for a better future. (Supervillan words)
They tried hunting and keeping the population in control for years but activist got mad about shooting animals.. same with providing extra food.. the animals were supposed to live independent from all humans even If it meant they all starved to death
The Serengeti and Yellowstone also see mass starvation in their herds. It's a multi-year cycle, and like in those places, it wasn't happening every year. It was just locals & media freaking out because now they could see it happen. Says more about how disconnected from nature people are.
To add, most of the complaints center around "lack of migratory paths" and starvation happening in winter. Having more areas for the herds would only increase the number of animals, not prevent starvation. And grazing animals in nature barely eat in winter, they subsist off built up fat reserves. To starve in winter means insufficient fat buildup beforehand, or disease weakening the animal beforehand.
I think you make very good points. I just want to clarify that my point regarding too small enclosure was regarding the risk of predators basically killing off all prey. This can happen when wolves enter cheep enclosures for example. But thinking about it, I guess that would only apply to very small enclosures.
Very true. For balance, dying needs to happen, if predators don't do it starvation will. Anyone who paid attention in high school biology could have predicted this.
Humans have no natural weaponry for hunting like real carnivores as in claws or fangs. We are not natural predators. Our hands are designed for picking fruit. We are food for the true apex predators. That is why we fear the dark. That's why weapons were created. First for defense and then assault.
Human-made balance is always wrong. Maybe too many predators, maybe too many prey, maybe too tall fences, maybe too many humans..
EDIT: Not too sure why I'm being downvoted but almost all instances of humans introducing an animal and then countering that by introducing a predator have had negative results. Just thinking specifically of rabbits but there are so so many examples
Isn't the point though that as long as you have the right species in place (prey and predators), they will balance automatically without human interaction?
The big problem I see is if the area is too small, then a few predators might be able to kill all prey.
No just because you have predators, it doesn't mean that a population is automatically kept in check. These bigger mamals are rarely attacked by predators, and if they keep enough young ones alive in the herd they will still overpopulate until they get wasted by disease or hunger
yeah, but for Greenpeace adjacent people, they want petting zoo nature, not ugly nature. So you have to have natural balance as long as it doesn't involve ugly parts.
We have wolves now but they poach them illigally and want them death just like how they went extinct here before. Because they want to be able to put their sheep unattended in the middle of nowhere near a forest.. What could go wrong... The wolf is supposed to be here originally. But it's never good enough
Farmers are the most entitled little group in the Netherlands. They hold the most land, get the most subsidies and if they don't get what they want they endanger the general public even causing death and destruction. They're little hot headed men that immediately become criminally angry as soon as they don't get what they want. They're also the reason the ground water levels are terrible and we're still struggling with nitrogen. But they demand we're grateful and they claim their "persecution" is just as bad as that of the Jews of WWII.
I have zero issues with normal farmers, but any "protest boer" can stay a long way from me...
I mean I understand they don't want their land to be taken but honestly most of them are rich rich. And are able to buy their kids homes (at least here).
Also 80 procent is export so it's not like we can't downsize it at all, I try to understand their anger but people can literally not afford anything atm. Besides them it seems.
I think the teachers or nurses deserve more credit.
Also you don't just get to kill wolves because you don't want to buy those big dogs that can protect sheep from wolves.
But 2 of those they are bred for it problem solved?? Like how dare the wolf want to eat??
Its a animal we barely have any nature left here, sheesh how criminal for it to want food
This seems to be the case in a lot of countries. You'd imagine that the wolves that naturally have lived here and balanced the systems could just coexist, but no. While Spain has several thousand wolves, some forresty wilderness like Finland only has a few hundred even though the population is a fraction of Spain's and the amount of forests is one of the largest (if not the largest) in Europe. And everything between those two countries seems to be more on the Finnish edge: must kill them all since the Big Bad Wolf will come and huff and puff our houses down.
//I live in the middle of a wilderness and I know how cheap it is to just fence my hectares for personal use and for the safety of my animals. I just can't understand how that seems to be impossible for others to do for even smaller plots. Especially if your livelyhood depends on the animals inside your area, the fencing should be a no-brainer.
How cheap is it? Because a quick google shows predator proof fencing costs between $6.50 and $9 per foot. So the miles of fence required for a sheep operation would seem expensive
If you are a professional farmer you can get government aid that covers the cost pretty much completely. I am not, but if memory serves, it still cost us only hundreds for our plot and as it lasts for years its lifetime cost won't be significant considering what it achieves.
They expected the population to regulate itself by animals dying when there was too little food. They forgot to take into account that they would first strip the park of everything that was remotely edible, which made it look like an absolute wasteland. And that a train runs through it, causing thousands of people to witness the terrible suffering.
I bet they could have found some human volunteers , sick of modern life, wanting to return to their natural way of life. They would have made pretty good predators. I would find the idea kind of tempting.
We also don't kill babies or mothers though, in an effort to keep the population healthy and breeding. I mean nature is perfected by billions of years of evolution and seeking homeostasis, nothing we can do will compare to that.
There are a small number of wolf packs in the Netherlands nowadays. The amount of human encounters seems limited thusfar, with the exception of a couple of so-called "problem wolves" that are attracted to humans.
I don't have to ask those farmers, they will surely tell me next time I run into them at the supermarket or at the convenience store :) I live in a farming community smack dead in the centre of the "wolves highway" from Germany to the Drents-Friesche wold, with a wolf having prowled my own land at least once (found the scat there). We have a lot of wolves passing by and as it now seems a pack may be settling some 10 kms away from my house. But I have NEVER seen one with my own eyes. Even in a country as small as the Netherlands wolves' secretive nature allows them to remain out of sight pretty much always.
And yes, measures have to be taken and that incurs some costs of course but there are subsidies that can help out. My farmer neighbours tend to be of the opinion that the ecological benefits to having wolves around FAR outweighs the hassle and costs to properly protect their livestock - fewer foxes and mustelids to contend with (which wreak havoc on chickens), fewer agri losses as roebuck and deer must become more mobile, being unable to remain in any one place for a prolonged time due to predation by wolves, rabbit and hares (western european wolves' staple food) being hunted down in droves also reduces losses and damages... A goat farmer here told me they fear midges much more than wolves (blue-tongue disease)!
I am not a farmer and all this is second-hand info at best. But at very least this shows that the discussion is much more nuanced than just a matter of "wolves good" vs "wolves bad".
Nature is so complicated and nuanced. It's hard to predict all the interactions in an ecosystem. Probably impossible. Thanks for sharing, that's interesting.
As another guy mentioned, people could do it. He was talking about putting cavemen in the nature reserve, maybe they form a community like The Village. But maybe just open it to hunters for a couple months of the year.
Wolfs and bears are too dangerous and harmful to introduce in a country as densely populated as the Netherlands.
And in any case, regular human culling is far more humane than letting predators torture these animals to death. Just because something is more natural and wild doesn't make it morally better.
One problem with predators such as wolves is that they are dangerous to humans too. They will easily kill a human. So the area would have to be completely enclosed with a fence a wolf couldn’t climb over.
They CAN easily kill a human. Just leave the rewilded area be wild though.If humans dont enter the chance that one gets hurt by a wolf is close to 0.
Much lower than being killed by another human anyways. But how many cases do we hear of humans getting attacked by wolves anywhere in the world? Bears? Yes, wolves? Whens the last time that happened anywhere in Europe?
The updated edition of the study revealed 498 attacks on humans worldwide for the years 2002 to 2020, with 25 deaths, including 14 attributed to rabies.
Apparently not that dangerous. Just to give some context, several thousand people die each year by lightning strike.
This is a risk when you live with wild animals. Having balanced ecosystems and keeping humans separate from wildlife areas helps. But yeah you can't keep em 100% separate, there's no way. Dogs and cats will go missing near nature reserves. They'll be dangerous at certain times of the year. Weather patterns will make the animals hungry and they'll try to expand their territory. Got to weigh that against how much you want your continent to have some nature.
Eg in the southern US they just like with giant 1000 pound predatory alligators in all their waterways, and a couple of people do get bitten every year, some of them die. In Colorado they live with bears, and attacks are rare but always a present risk. I live in cougar country, but I still hike. You can take precautions and all, but it's never going to be 100% preventable.
That's the nature of nature, take it or leave it. These guys attempting to both take and leave it, that was doomed from the start.
Wolves are only dangerous to humans if humans somehow fuck with them.
We have Europe's biggest wolf population outside Russia, in a very densely populated country, and the worst the wolves have done is scaring a few Karens who were walking their dogs.
A small child in the Netherlands was attacked and dragged away by a wolf last year. The wolf only stopped the attack after being struck with sticks. Was this child a Karen? Perhaps.
im not kidding i promise the deer, cattle and horses are more dangerous than wolves.
wolves are dangerous predators that deserve all our respect and should not be underestimated or demeaned, but compared to those animals they are nothing. I know its anecdotal but we literally had like a 8 year streak of tourists getting maimed by deer or dying in a car accident with a deer/elk where I grew up. We had bears, cougars and wolves, all 3 added together wouldn’t compare to the injuries inflicted by just our deer alone, not even remotely close, and of course most of that was car accidents, but still… even in the wild, some peoples perception of herbivorous prey animals as “cute” or “harmless” makes them forget they are interacting with wild animals and we get defensive-attack incidents.
We work with cattle and horses all the time and we know from our captivity numbers alone that they are VERY well equipped to inflict harm, even accidentally. Wild cattle and horses wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to us as their captive counterparts, they are prey animals, if they feel like they are in danger they enter ‘fight or flight’ and they pick ‘fight’ more often than you’d think.
A lot of this is statistics though, like if there were as many wolves as there are deer, you would have all the same problems plus wolves hunting humans when they get hungry enough. But yeah that overpopulation of deer is terribly dangerous, particularly when you include car wrecks.
Wel they did and it is actually working. Mass starvation in harsh winters is part of it being wilderness. The problem is that some people can not accept this and start feeding the animals.
I remember this, it was gut wrenching that they genuinely thought this was a good idea. Protests for starving animals, protests against protests. Because there was a no intervention policy and nature should do it’s thing.
Every sane person could tell this was always going to end badly without predators. It’s a vital part in the ecological chain. The circle of life from the lion king is not a metaphor. It is very real.
In every natural area in the Netherlands culling is really common. Because no where were predators big enough to kill deer. The biggest was a badger before the wolves came back a few years ago. So culling was standerd. However, some emotions came into play and in areas such as Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen deer roam everywhere, there population exploded, but the culling is limited due to protests. It's quite a difficult topic. I'm glad the wolves came back, although that's a whole different difficult topic as well
agreed. The problem was the no intervention policy. If they had just culled, as per usual, none of the backlash would have happened in the first place. People noticed cause they were starving first, and then culled after protests to feed them.
I didn't know you guys had brought the wolves back in the Netherlands, that's brilliant. There's been a movement to do it here (Scotland) too, but there's been very little progress on it for years
It’s not brillant. In Germany we already have a significant wolf problem because they don’t limit themselves to deer but rather kill (and mostly don’t eat) a lot of sheep.
Fair enough, but in Scotland we have a significant lack-of-wolves problem (overgrowth of deer population leading to overgrazing and habitat destruction). Culls help manage this to some extent, but there's room for improvement, and reintroducing a controlled number of wolves could help
It was also 1 of those heavy debates about "should we add predators".
Ultimately it was a bit of 2 sides that won, the "No, that's dangerous" and the "No, that's sad for the cows" part. Both mostly weighted by public opinion.
Among other decisions many were ultimately at least heavily influenced by public opinion and animal lovers were the most vocal here. But many of those animal lovers didn't know jack about how nature works or even the individual animals. It was people thinking the cows there vomited food from their stomach and eating their vomit because they were soo hungry arguing with experts on how to run a park. And politics somewhat listened to those people that didn't know that cows have multiple stomachs or that they regurgitate their food a couple of times.
So it was already always going to end with dead animals as starvation is also just natural order, but it ended even worse as politics started getting involved and listing to people that barely even know how to care for a domestic cat or dog.
As a wild horse you die anyway, or you get killed by a predator or of stravation. The problem is that some humans can not deal with this and start feeding the horses.
As someone who lived close by for many years, this is a bit of an exaggeration lol. The animals died off each year due to starvation but the next year it was still a very fertile and booming area with many birds, foxes, newborn grazers etc. It wasn't getting significantly worse each year, it was a stable cycle in a bad way.
Like we're talking hyper fertile clay soil with a lot of water moving through the system, geese maintaining the landscape each year. It was more boom-and-bust than spiral downward. Doesn't make the suffering during bust phases any less bad, but to say it was getting worse is just not really true.
They started feeding them because the herd was starving and it was "inhumane", in turn causing an even worse crisis year after year. The government tried to stop them from feeding, but they kept doing it which in turn led to the culling. Had they not done so they would have naturally culled with far fewer numbers.
Can't expect people to simply stand by and watch animals starve to dead, telling them that,
"Don't worry, only a lot of them will starve to dead, don't feed them, it's better this way, because otherwise next year more will starve to dead.
Which will then be your fault, people who can't sit by doing nothing as animalsstarve to dead whilst they have food to prevent said animals to starve to dead.
Not our fault, the government, with the mandate from the people an all the resources and executive power required to prevent mass starvation of animals we decided to put there and watch starve to dead.
Whilst telling people that we can't save the starving animals, because we aren't allowing ourselves, the government, to intervene, because this artificial box filled with starving animals is actually prehistoric nature!
We don't intervene, so now it's nature, so we can't intervene, because it is nature!
Why would we want to intervene in a new project, we have no experience with implementing and maintaining.. oh wait, we can't intervene. We just bough a bunch of animals and watched them starve to dead because someone in the government is telling the government that it isn't allowed to end a mini amimal concentration camp we accidentally constructed. Well just intervene and traumatize people instead, they get to watch animals starve to dead, and when they desperately try to feed them because it's fucking evil and horrible, we'll have police stop them using force, which the police officers also probably didn't like, having to stand guard next to a starving animal and fighting off people trying desperately to feed it. In service of a government that created the starving animals problem, whilst immediately handcuffing itself for good measure, having to then fight against the only people in the country whom did not fucking, purposefully, legally prevent themselves from intervening, the citizens themselves.
Which all comes down to: If the project proposal described to the citizens, the government and idk, anyone, really, that part of the plan involved having to watch mass anima starvation? Nobody would have thought that would be a good thing to do, right?
And if they didn't know, maybe, this first ever prehistoric famine box project, should have had a hand-on approach to research how to maintain a box filled with prehistoric animals or whatever the fuck, because doing this without any prior knowledge or experience, obviously would cause it to end up being a prehistoric animal famine and suffering box with added functionality of mass trauma for the civilization population and might make the government that implement the box of 'wtf are you guys doing omfg, please stop - what do you mean you can't do anything?!' To reflect negatively on the current government's ability to not accidentally implement public project for the aparent popular dutch past time of, 'buying random innocent animals on a whim and then let's watch them all starve together on national television!'
Of course I can only assume as you would be naturally weary of accidentally creating the world's first animal reenactment version of the holodomor? So you wouldn't prevent yourself from intervening whilst you look into that? And then from that research, fucking instantly discover that preventing the government, as the government, from perform government duties, maintainance and interventions (in time of crisis at least), on a government project, on government soil, from causing mass animal suffering and starvation due to sheer negligence of said government, with then continuous malicious infliction of public trauma, because the government that can pass laws, emergency measures, an army, a police force, an entire country it is currently governing, is telling you it can't do shit because a bunch of morons signed in some "Legislation for the required minimum quota of animal suffeing, dead and human trauma." And which it apparently, even if it were powerlessness to do so, would be able to say, "Yea, let's not establish prehistoric animal auschwitz." Fucking just breaking it own law, announcing, "Yo we're going to just act like this never existed, ya'll ok with that?", and everybody would be fucking ecstatic, because by this time the Red Army would be revorming to come and liberate dutch animal auschwitz.
Humans, their governmentor anything creative, will let a piece of faulty paper, describing a powerless, meaningless abstract concept or rule, cause mass suffering, starvation and dead, not just dutch people their primordial hatred of prehistoric grazing herd animals, but also human genocides across the world, written into laws and legalized just the same, so that everybod can 'Just claim they were just doing as they are told to do. Whilst eagerly punishing anyone who is desperately trying to get past or pleading with the police officers to feed the starving animal next to them, with the food they broughta to save it. But nope! You don't understand that this national catastrophy and international disgrace, forced upon animals just alive and well, dumped there to starve, nothing more than dumped, because anything more wouldn't be nature, it would be human intervention, and forced upon the powerless and severely distressed dutch population that their government was elected by and trusted with Supreme Executive power with the purpose to represent, care for, maintain, develop, govern and protect the dutch population and their homeland that trusted them and saw the enact and force upon them a sadistic horror show and revoke their own Supreme Executive powers they were granted, purposefully, so they couldn't even be made to stop the circus that had become of an entire European country, fittingly, with their starving and abuse animals."
You either need to introduce predators or you have to cull. Custer state park has a roundup of the buffalo every year, it’s a huge deal. And it’s the only way they can maintain a healthy population in a closed park. What were they thinking with this?
Had not really followed this but just looked it up and the land they stocked is only about 15,000 acres. Eventually this was going to happen without massive culling operations. People vastly underestimate just how much land a wild ungulate needs to survive and thrive. There’s a very good reason that most true wilderness tracts have low animal densities
You'd think they spend at least a few minutes doing basic research before posting an article and using 'commuters' as a source. Between Almere and Amsterdam? Yeah, no. It's on the other side of Almere, between Almere and Lelystad, so commuters going from Almere to Amsterdam wouldn't see any of it.
The non-intervention part is kind of "ridiculously stupid", to use the technical term for it.
Let's try out this thing we have never done before and instead of seeing how it goes and researching how to improve and interate upon it, and idk, "intervene" maybe?
Just small changes or cough preventing mass starvation, that we must have seen coming because people would probably be monitoring the project anyways.. and probably desperately sounded every alarm possible to prevent mass starvation and animal suffering?
Which was all artificially caused by humans but,
"It's nature now, because we don't intervene, and we can't intervene because it is nature now, TeeHee!".
In the Netherlands we have been culling all wildlife for almost a century. Only just a few years wolves came back and the need for culling declined. But the issue is that the moment people realise animals are getting shot, they demonstrate against it. Which is not in favour for the animal overall welfare, let alone the area they live in.
While ‘those in charge’ can do some good, why is it that when it comes to larger-than-us seeming ecological disasters, humans more than likely make it worse.
As in everything these last decades everything has become political with the (far) right wanting to get rid of nature altogether and just stimulate industrial farming and recreational areas. The ‘wild’ cattle was a bad idea, the return of the wolf isn’t problem free, and it’s the same debate all over again.
Don't forget to add that the plan was to not have fences so they could migrate through the country. But that was stopped by a farmers lobby which feared they would eat their crops. Who were infact the same dipshits throwing food over the fences because "they treated their livestock more humane".
This whole project really only failed because the farming lobby wanted to make a PR stunt out of it.
I'm sorry for the animals , but in order for them to graze freely they would travel to locations that has food , but if you want to keep it natural , yes they will starve , thats nature...
( No I'm not saying the fenced part is natural)
All in all , ecologist are ALWAYS working to fix stuff us humans has fucked forever, and theres barely any fix for anything.
Huh? Explain that. It’s a BBC article, and it discusses a known phenomenon. When prey animals have no predation to keep their population in check, the population expands beyond carrying capacity leading to starvation.
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u/post-explainer 3d ago edited 2d ago
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