Posted on 01/17/2018 10:29:30 PM PST by nickcarraway
It's almost funny.
Academics tend not to see humans as special creations of God. We're just animals. Not special.
And we're bad, because we hunted the Passenger Pigeon into extinction.
And the Dodo.
And the great auk.
etc.
But people still think a predator cannot cause prey to become extinct? Look in the mirror.
CA’s okay with two-legged coyotes, but not the 4-legged variety.
Bigots.
Coyotes eat a lot of mice, I am told.
Article focuses on coyotes coming down from Marin.
Why not discuss from the south? There is a butt load of them on the peninsula.
When younger I rode my mountain bike in the area between the Water Temple and Montara Peak, and saw a coyote almost every single time I rode. They sometimes stalked me.
Lots and lots of them in the area of 280 and 92.
Maybe they are hunting the promiscuous homos at that scenic vista right there on 280.
Same here but forest is pretty thick and daylight
sightings are relatively rare.
“...analogous to the early relationship between humans and dogs (or cats)...”
After that Russian experiment which domesticated Silver Foxes in 40 generations, I wonder if it would be possible to domesticate coyotes? Wish I could afford to set up such a program.
However, wild coyotes are an invasive (in most places), dangerous predator. The only sensible thing to do is exterminate them outside their natural range.
I’ve seen raccoons drag flattened squirrels from the
road, too.
ON our tax dollars.
Some years later the moose won. There were like 1000 moose and only 4 wolves left.
So can they leave it alone? No, the left has to whine and sob until we all pay for more wolves to be put on the island.
I cannot tell you how much this stuff ticks me off.
Most decent academics will tell you THERE IS NO NATURAL BALANCE but some looney leftist earth-worshippers are still stuck in the 60s and spending our tax money on their idiocy.
In BC the caribou herds are nearly all decimated thanks to the wolf introduction. The great elk herds of the west near Yellowstone have mostly been declared unrecoverable, also thanks to the wolf introduction.
Well, not to get to a philosophical/theological debate and completely deviate from the actual topic, but ...
As a Christian, I can say that humans are more than animals. We are special. Perhaps different rules apply to us -- we have free will, we have moral laws, we ought to answer to a higher authority. It's different for wolves.
But the typical Academic researcher would not see it that way. For many of them, there is no higher authority, there is no moral law. We are just animals. Smart animals, I suppose, but just animals. From a strictly materialist standpoint, perhaps even free will should be questioned.
Well, if we are animals, then we are like wolves and we can be slotted into the predator-prey equation. In which case, clearly predators drive some prey into extinction. The Liberal Do-Gooders are always giving us a hard time on that score. We killed the Dodo, right?
But if the predator-prey equilibrium can be questioned at all, then surely humans must be removed from the conversation. So ... we're not just animals. We are somehow special.
Academics often conveniently shift humans around -- sometimes we are treated like special creations of God and must be considered somehow separate from the animals, and sometimes we are no better than a ground hog. It seems to depend on where the grant money is flowing or what the political ideology demands..
A dead coyote. There’s a real tragedy.
Very good and interesting read. Thanks for posting it all!
*** “If coyotes fulfill some vital role in the ecology, I have yet to hear of it” ***
They feed mosquitoes, ticks, fleas and lice that would otherwise go hungry.
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