Reading Barry Lopez’s book “Of Wolves and Men”:
[…] disadvantage. The important thing to bear in mind is that generally wolves do not overrun the prey population and kill it out, although they have been known to do so, just as they have, extraordinary as it seems, practiced a kind of fallow-field farming by not killing deer in certain parts of their territories for four or five years, letting the prey population recover there.
Wolf science needs more scrutiny on its claims, ever since the alpha male paper which did an incredible amount of damage to society.
That or we come out with a bunch of fake claims about wolves which would improve society, were they to be applied to people
I know, I know, that’s an insult to science, but how cool would it be if Joe Rogan started spreading the idea that the wolves in a pack survive longer when they share resources more evenly? Or that “lone wolves” do best when they’re cordial with nearby packs? Maybe even that packs formed by genetically diverse wolves outperform homogeneous packs, even if the individual wolves are stronger in the less diverse groups?
I’m being mostly sarcastic here, because I really do value honest research, but it’s a nice thought.
Of course, we already have chimps and bonobos, who are basically ideal proxies for mostly warlike and mostly peaceful humans, respectively, and it hasn’t made us any less violent.
Pretty sure idiots were gonna use whatever else enables their idiocy anyway, this was just one of a myriad of ways to flavour said idiocy.
Didn’t help tho
This book directly debunks all of that stuff, but I don’t know enough to judge the author’s other claims. Not sure where to turn, to be honest. I thought I was already doing my due diligence by reading this book 😭