Recent Studies imply Smaller Wolf Packs Result in More Conflicts

As most of you know, this blog's primary purpose is a twofold endeavor: 

1. To dispel myth and erroneous information, by increasing knowledge and facts about wolves among the general public. 

2.  To further the cause of wolf conservation by supporting the reinstatement of wolves to endangered status. 

To this end, I began to think about the repercussions of this latest surge of violence upon the wolf as a species. 

The social structure within a wolf pack is highly evolved, much like that of humanity. Consider the pack as an extended family that forms strict hierarchies and within this organized group, each member has a particular job to perform in order to ensure survival of them all. By working together, wolves can swiftly dispatch prey thereby ensuring perpetuation of life and the family unit. For wolves this order IS essential to their existence. 

Since wolves are highly social, they depend upon interaction with other members of the pack. That interaction reaffirms order and rank within the family and within the sexes, as well. Breeding generally occurs between the Alpha male and female and their pups are well cared for by all members of the pack. The structure of the pack ensures that those pups will be well protected so that life may continue. 

But what happens when the pack order is disrupted? What happens when that order is disrupted continually? Imagine chaos and confusion and fragmentation of the pack and you have your answer. Unless roles are swiftly redefined, then the pack will disperse into vagabonds and lone wolves. Imagine if someone came into your home and killed your father and mother. What happens to the kids? Grandma is sent to a home for the elderly and the kids are farmed out separately to strangers. Even with the loss of one family member, the psychological cost on remaining lives is devastating. 

Doesn't the essence of the wolf pack beg the question of what effects does indiscriminate hunting have on wolves as a whole? My task was to set out to discover if any research is presently conducted along those lines of reason. And unlike USFG, I wanted to base the results on generated facts.  

So far, I have found two papers to address the ramifications of this disruption of social order among members of any given wolf pack. The first is a doctoral thesis by Barbara Zimmerman and her research asserts that the loss of pack members results in smaller packs that ultimately kill three times more prey items than larger packs. 

The second paper has found a correlation between smaller pack size and depredation of cattle. 

I have uploaded these papers to my Dropbox account and invite everyone to download and read for yourselves these findings. And once you do, aside from the fact that wolves should be protected as a common sense approach to wildlife management, I hope that you will see what I see--that how wolves are being managed in the present only serves to make a bad situation worse, and that this is how mismanagement is accomplished for such a noble species of animal. 

Lin


Download these two papers here:  

Predatory Behavior of Wolves in Scandinavia. Barbara Zimmerman


Link 1: Zimmerman PhD Thesis

Predators and People: from conflict to conservation. (Eds. Nina
Fascione, Aimee Delach and Martin Smith). Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Link 2: Predator to People -from conflict to conservation