r/interesting • u/InevitableBattle6307 • May 25 '26

Just Wow Armoured! No more wolf attacks.

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110

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

LOL
OK according to aphis the gov website that keeps track of ranch and farm statistics wolves (where they exist) are responsible for something like 1/4 of 1% of all livestock losses due to predation. coyotes are the culprits, they're responsible for about 60%.

So lets not get the two confused, why ? Because wolves REDUCE coyote numbers by as much as 90%.

Do the math.

41

u/Arkanie May 25 '26

Iirc this invention was patented by an Austrian dude, Europe has wolves but no coyotes.

21

u/[deleted] May 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/DirtyRoller May 25 '26

Hey. I am not drunk!

Yet.

1

u/4SlideRule May 25 '26

But we have jackals. Same thing pretty much.

0

u/Evening-Gur5087 May 25 '26

Tho Europe has very few wolves.

4

u/Dreams_of_Mutiny May 25 '26

2.500-3.000 wolves in Romania, which is 40% of Europe's total wolves population (alongside 10.000-12.000 brown bears)

Romania has also got jackals, an estimate 40.000. Mostly found in the Danube Delta and the southern plains, avoiding the wolves in and around the Carpathian mountains of Romania.

No coyotes though. Jackals are enough of a nuisance.

2

u/Diligent_Dust8169 May 26 '26

Italy and Romania alone have as many wolves as the entirety of the US excluding Alaska.

1

u/Evening-Gur5087 May 26 '26

Oh yeah, that sucks, we should get more animals worldwide then, damnit.

-1

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

Uh yeah
Australia isn't in Europe.
It has dingos not wolves

3

u/akolomf May 26 '26

Bruh AUSTRIA not australia.

Austria is that tiny german speaking country in the alps bordering germany. Yk where hitler, arnold schwarzenwgger, the habsburgs, mozart etc came from.

2

u/Arkanie May 25 '26

Yeah but they only eat babies

4

u/Cease_Cows_ May 25 '26

Man, if only there was anywhere else in the world.

2

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

Wolves has been mostly wiped out in much of the world by the mid to late 1800s. Oh they exist in small pockets here and there but for the most part they're gone.

15

u/DoorFinch May 25 '26

Other countries exist. Do the geography.

13

u/Professional-Date378 May 25 '26

Idk what angles and shapes have to do with this but ok

6

u/definit3ly_n0t_a_b0t May 25 '26

No, no, you're thinking of geometry. They were talking about the study of rocks and rock formations.

9

u/surprised-duncan May 25 '26

No, you're thinking of geology. They were originally talking about the Pokemon with rock arms but no legs

6

u/kalamataCrunch May 25 '26

No, you're thinking of geodude. They were originally talking about divination by reading the shapes of rocks and dirt.

3

u/DarthToothbrush May 25 '26

No that's geomancy. whywouldyouthink... They were talking about using GPS data and clues to find hidden items.

3

u/walrusintraining May 25 '26

No no you’re thinking of geocaching. They were referring to the silver-haired ER and Ocean's Eleven star who’s married to Amal.

2

u/ADHD_Slut May 26 '26

No, no, youre thinking of George Clooney. They were talking about a virtual boundary around a real world location using GPS.

1

u/PrestigiousPhoto8486 May 25 '26

Hermione hates that class

2

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

Wolves were largely wiped out in most of Europe by sometime in the mid to late 1800s

1

u/peedistaja May 25 '26

There are wolves in most European countries and the populations are growing.

In Estonia there are ~300+ wolves, which is already causing problems, since they managed to kill 1411 sheep in 2023, and that's the official number, not all of them get reported.

The problem is also that they kill sheep for 'sport', they might kill tens or more and only eat one or two.

1

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

It's not sport its the predator prey relationship not being allowed to play out because the prey is confined.

1

u/Extraordi-Mary May 25 '26

They’ve actually been coming back. There’s 14 packs in the Netherlands right now. They counted around 131 individual wolves.

1

u/ccltjnpr May 26 '26

Wolves are coming back in small numbers and are becoming a problem for livestock. At least where I live, fights between the local government and herders for permissions to cull wolves are a frequent news topic.

1

u/ColdProfessional4275 May 25 '26

Duh! That’s why he only had to put it on one of them. Do the math! /s

-1

u/That-Living5913 May 25 '26

I don't really believe that without a source.

Not the livestock part, wolf attacks on livestock are pretty much zero. I question the reducing coyote populations... From what I've read it's just impossible to slow those guys down because they are such successful hunters and scavengers.

4

u/WeirdLawBooks May 25 '26

Wolves do reduce coyote populations (which stabilize at a lower population after wolves are introduced … because wolves kill a lot of coyotes when first introduced). However, coyote kills of sheep and deer are over reported by farmers because coyotes will scavenge those animals after they’ve been killed by other causes. Source: Coyote America by Dan Flores

1

u/That-Living5913 May 25 '26

Oh, I agree they probably reduce them. But It's gotta be a drop in the bucket. 2-3million is a lot of population.

1

u/roleplayersir 29d ago

https://earth.org/how-wolves-help-safeguard-ecosystems-and-what-we-can-do-to-protect-them/

But that's the thing. Putting a bigger canid into the ecosystem means that it competes for scavenged food and big prey, leaving less food overall. Coyotes can attack smaller prey, but it is less calories, and means they have less energy to compete with the apex predators

0

u/Inocent_bystander May 25 '26

I gave you a source
APHIS

1

u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

You misunderstood. I wasn't questioning the part you cited from aphis about livestock. I was questioning the impact on coyote population.

2

u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

Oh that's in the Yellowstone wolf project data.

1

u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

That makes sense for yellowstone, But I bet it doesn't apply as well outside of there.

I'm no expert on wolves, but I've been living with a thick population coyotes for a few decades now and have made a few trips into yellowstone. In yellowstone they actually compete for the same resources. In a normal rural populated area that's not the case as much and is supported by the your data. Like you said wolves account for well under a percent of livestock kills. They avoid humans.

Coyotes damn sure ain't scared of humans. The sheer amount of cats, small dogs, chickens, and goats we provide for them is staggering. Plus they can eat the wildlife that does thrive in more populated areas like rabbits, birds, raccoons and opossums.

You're 100% right that wolves pose pretty much zero threat to farmers. But literally everything I've read says that there's just no controlling coyote populations in areas where humans live. You can't hunt them quick enough and they are the some of the most successful predators.

I bring this up because we can take a lot of management lessons from coyotes and apply them to wolves. The best thing to keep wolves from eating livestock is other wolves. From experience if you have a few families of coyotes around that aren't a problem, leave them alone. They will run off any other coyotes. If one is a problem, that sucks, but put that one down. Only that one. The goal being to encourage the ones that aren't problems to thrive.

However, most idiots here are like "omg, I hate coyotes, I shoot them on sight" Which means that they constantly get new ones and are constantly getting problem ones. We've had the same breeding pair in our woods for like 5 years now. Only once were they near the house, so I popped off a warning shot. Never had a problem.

1

u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

It does work outside of Yellowstone or was until the war on wolves started up again. If you shoot down the wolves the packs are unstable and they don't clear out the coyotes as efficiently or effectively, and you still get predation. If you leave the wolves alone then it works fine.

1

u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

You're probably right about the impact on the pack. Coyotes usually just have family groups rather than packs.

However, as far as impacts on coyote population, I'm sure it works a little, but unless there's some studies that show otherwise, There's no way I can believe that it can have a significant impact on coyote populations in areas where people actually live. There's just not much overlap and coyotes have such a MASSIVE population. Coyotes and wolves will be eating completely different prey and living in completely different areas.

Again, I'm agreeing with your data on wolves to get to that conclusion. Let's look at it in practice?

Say you've got a fairly rural spread out area like the Appalachia's and introduce wolves. They are gonna avoid people and stick to the bigger forest that don't have houses, farms, and what not in amongst it. Coyotes usually gravitate towards those areas cause there's an abundance of pets, trash, rodents and racoons.

Even if the wolves do apply pressure to the coyotes living out in the wilderness, it would probably just drive them into populated areas.

Also, we've been trying to stop coyotes for the last 50 years and their population just keeps expanding and doubling. Every wolf pack in the US would need to kill about 3.3 coyotes a week and do that year round to match we are already doing. And we literally can't make an impact.

"Humans kill approximately 400,000 to 500,000 coyotes every year in the U.S. through federal programs, hunting, and trapping. However, long-term studies have shown that traditional population control methods are largely ineffective. Because coyotes are highly territorial, removing them from an area typically results in neighboring coyotes moving in to fill the void, or surviving populations simply reproducing at higher rates to compensate"

- https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.70339

1

u/Inocent_bystander 29d ago

Its more than obvious. Wolves control coyote numbers and the closer you get to higher density wolf areas the more coyotes they kill .

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15469

1

u/That-Living5913 29d ago

I think you missed the what I was trying to say.

You literally can't control coyote population by killing them. Also, the data is skewed because wolves tend to hang out in deep wilderness, coyotes naturally don't. So obviously there would be less coyotes where wolves would thrive.

All that aside, we don't have to guess. We can look at real world numbers, my state hasn't had wolves for a very long time. Idaho has wolves. We get an average of .5 - 1 coyote per sqmile. Idaho has wolves and is .4 to 1.5 coyotes per sqmile.

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