I was watching a documentary on the Caledonian forest and recalled another documentary about Yellowstone. Today, a massive population explosion of red deer has deeply suppressed all vegetation, let alone actual trees in scotland.
The take home from Yellowstone is wonderfully important. A pack of wolves do hunt down deer. Yet that turns out to be almost the least of it. We could do that ourselves, howeever poorly. Their howls cause the deer to control where they hide out to preserve themselves. They largely go to ground and stay close to protective cover.
This basically means that a single pack tracking local deer allows foresty recovery in a massive radius wihout the need for fences.
This matters. The largest single problem facing North American agriculture will be excessive deer and hog populations in particular. The Smaller animals are well controlled by coyotes and foxes who are both territorial. Farmers are slowly learning to shoot neither. Clearly the answer to all this will be a local wolf pack.
Can we actually loosely manage these packs? The best way is to actually provide winter feed for when the deer population itself is under stress. This can come straight from slaughter houses. The wolves are smart and will figure all this out quick enough. It will also allow for proper tagging and electronic tagging as well.
This really matters. We really do need to know the location of the local pack to prevent mistakes. They are territorial as well, but also must range out after the deer.
They can also be taught to work well with human agriculture, Recall that a local coyote will run off competition and also stay away from the farmers livestock as well with a little encouragement and rogue elimination.
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