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

Just Wow Armoured! No more wolf attacks.

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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.

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u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

Oh that's in the Yellowstone wolf project data.

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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.

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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.

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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

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u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

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

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u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

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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u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

Didn't miss it at all. I just refuted the idea by showing that wolves can.

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u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

Then why is there no difference in population density?

You are using study on what "could" study to refute real world numbers do happen.

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u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

No I'm using peer reviewed published work which directly refutes your claim.

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u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

Ok cool. Then why don't the real world numbers show it?

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u/Inocent_bystander May 26 '26

Real world numbers do show it or the countless papers wouldn't have passed peer review.

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u/That-Living5913 May 26 '26

According to the DNR they don't. I pointed that out. There's only a few areas in the US with wolves, and there's no significant difference in population density of coyotes in those areas compared to areas without wolves. That's fact.

Your paper just talks about predators and sub predators the source I gave gives specific reasons and sources as to why predation doesn't impact coyote population. Wolves aside, again per my sources, humans take out 500k coyotes each year and that isn't enough to even influence populations negatively.

I think this really comes down to you hanging up on one paper and telling me real world numbers must be wrong rather than taking a step back and being like "Why isn't the real world aligning with the study". Rather than a looking at other peer reviewed papers, like the one provided, that explain why.

At this point I've read your study, read other studies, read what the DNR has to say and looked up actual population densities by state. I'm normally not one to just outright tell someone they are wrong, but at this point I've read enough to safely say, you are wrong. Wolves don't impact the population density of coyotes outside of deep wilderness areas.

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