@Discovery Channel broadcasts "Yukon Men" hunting wolves TY @hardcorerox

The latest trend in reality TV highlights man against nature in extreme environments and Discovery Channel leads the way with a slough of shows that depict people fighting against impossible odds. However, Discovery Channel, in their show, "Yukon Men," suggests that the hunting of wolves is acceptable in such conditions.

As you can see in the above footage, the men living in the harsh winter of the Yukon think that wolf predation is the reason why moose are scarce; they think, ah! let's go kill some wolves so we can kill more moose. These people obviously have no idea about the bell curve in population studies that clearly show a correlation between predator and prey, with prey determining the number of predators at any given time. When prey items are few, predators will produce less offspring. When prey numbers rise, so does the predator population. 

But these burly men, like many who are uneducated, think that taking matters into their own hands is productive. These Yukon Men represent the core problem occurring in nature: interference. By disturbing the delicate balance between predator and prey, they disrupt both communities and throw that relationship completely off kilter. The balance between predator and prey takes years sometimes to arrive once stasis is lost. Short-sighted Yukon Men never stop to see the bigger picture.

There is another problem in Yukon Men's thinking. A line in the above clip admonishes the wolves over a moose kill, because that moose could have fed several families. These men obviously think that all of nature is theirs to use indiscrimently. This attitude harms all of the natural world, as these people think everything in nature is theirs to use, as they wish. If they want to live out their fantasy in such a climate, then they need to learn to live with and among other species, and not think of themselves as overlords and masters.

We  are stewards of the earth and the guardianship of all things living has been placed into our hands. We have a choice: we can be stupid and take from the earth until she cannot sustain us or we can be smart and use science to help us care for  that precious life to keep us all alive. The hunting of wolves is never a smart choice. Better the Yukon Men return to civilization than to kill an ecosystem that was functioning well before the cameras ever arrived.

~~Lin