Articles

As discussed above, predators change animal behavior. All predators change the behavior of prey animals.

Predators can also alter the behavior of other predators. For instance, wolves change how bears behave, and the other way around.

These different effects on animal behavior are probably as important to wildlife and habitat health as controlling animal populations, although both are essential.

Human hunters also change bear and wolf behavior because both species—when hunted—fear humans. This learned fear is why limited hunting of these species reduces bear/wolf-human conflict and counterintuitively protects predators.

Human hunting and human impact have always shaped the systems into what we today think of as “natural.” Removing humans from them is the most unnatural of all the wildlife “management” perversions.

Here is a Washington Post article on the CWD threat from elk feeding. The paper says CWD was “identified” 50-years ago. The ‘rest of the story’ is that the “identification” occurred in a Colorado state experimental station in Ft. Collins: It’s like saying that the corona virus was “identified” in a lab in Wuhan, China.

Origins aside, CWD’s spread is a symptom of the true problem for Yellowstone elk – the lack of human hunting and other human (management) impacts.

Because bison, elk and deer are of particular interest to many of our readers, let’s consider Yellowstone Park and its surrounding 15-million acres as a laboratory on elk health. Nowhere on Earth has a larger, better funded wildlife “management” laboratory existed to test whether predation, hunting, and active human management, competes with or is complementary to prey species like bison, elk and deer.

Videos

A family of marmots prepares for their upcoming hibernation in a den 6 – 20 feet underground. Fourteen species of this animal are found across the world.

At Pitchstone Waters we have the Hoary Marmot. It can weigh 11-pounds and live 15-years. The animals emerge from their dens in April and go back in early August, when the green grass growth slows. Scientists have recently found that marmots do not age while hibernating, which in our area is eight months per year.

This video on the restoration of elk in Kentucky and other Eastern states begins, “There is perhaps no higher calling for a wildlife conservation organization than restoring extirpated wildlife species back to their historic ranges.”

How true, except in Texas, where our state game department with the support or acquiescence of major conservation organizations, removes all elk – a Texas native species – from all far-West Texas lands it manages, under the scientifically bogus theory that elk ‘compete’ with and thereby harm desert bighorn sheep, mule deer and pronghorn.

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