Wolfie

Read here as some eco-hippie tool in Germany tells people that a resurgence in the wolf population is a good thing:

Wolves lived here in the past, and they have a specific function in the ecosystem. Wolves prefer sick and weak animals as their prey, giving other animals an advantage by ensuring them more room and food. We call wolves the "health police." But there is also a social aspect to this: Humans wiped out the wolf when nature was perceived in oversimplified terms as either good or bad. But now we have accepted both sides of the animal.

Bovine excrement. If that last part of his statement were true, there'd be no outcry about ranchers shooting wolves. But there is, and it is becoming quite tiresome to hear.

While a lone wolf is no serious threat to an armed and uninjured human adult, a pack of wolves is a very different matter. There is a good reason wolves were wiped out by civilization. This distorted and perverted version of evolution which is espoused by the modern eco-worshipers, this wrong-headed idea that everything has a right to live, is nonsense of the most dangerous sort. Everything has a "right" to compete -- in the sense that you cannot stop a living organism from competing and attempting to grow, short of killing it. The "right" to live is just the natural result of being a successful competitor, not an immutable privilege conveyed by mere existence. Nature makes no guarantees -- nor does it brook interference, but I'll get to that in minute.

Many millions of species have gone extinct during the history of this planet. It's how natural selection works, and we are part of the natural selection process -- despite the incessant attempts by misguided individuals and institutions to clamber onto the dais of godhood. If a species falls out of the ecosystem, it's either because it is no longer needed or because something else is taking its place. Either way, adding wolves (or anything else) to the list of extinct species won't tip the Earth on its axis and send us all spinning into the sun, nor will Mother Gaia rise up and smite us for our betrayal of some imaginary "responsibility."

In this particular case, I suspect there is an unconscious conflation at work in the minds of many people, suggesting to them that wolves and domestic dogs are somehow similar. While they do share common ancestors, dogs have been bred by humans for at least 10,000 years -- perhaps much longer -- and have become symbiotic with us. They are part of our pack, so to speak. Dogs can read our moods, respond to our commands, protect our young, and generally exist as a beneficial part of our various societies. Wolves are not dogs. They are a predatory species and they are in no way domesticated or predictable, any more than are lions or sharks. They arose through evolution to fill a specific niche in the environment. When that niche was no longer extant, they declined sharply in population. That is reality; anything else is just self-deception.

People nowadays spend far too much time watching ignorant fantasy shows, many of them masquerading as science (see: the Discovery Channel), which they then internalize as a twisted version of how nature works. Nature is not a self-aware entity. Nature does not care about wolves or butterflies or you or me. Nature is not the magical medium in which we live; we are Nature. When we arrogantly elevate ourselves to the status of gods, proclaiming from on high that we stand outside of Nature, that such-and-such species has an inherent right to exist and thus deserves this-and-that amount of land and provender with no expectation of return on investment, we are by definition tampering with processes which are at the very root of existence. We are in effect shouting at the Universe, "We know better!" And that will always end badly -- not for the wolves, but for us.