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Reintroduce Megafauna to North America?
sneakers563 writes "A team of scientists is proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago. The scientists say that parks could be set up as breeding sanctuaries for species of large wild animals under threat in Africa and Asia, and that such ecological history parks could be major tourist attractions. 'Africa and parts of Asia are now the only places where megafauna are relatively intact, and the loss of many of these species within this century seems likely,' the team said."
This sounds great in theory, but where in the US are we going to put free roaming lions so they will be no danger to persistantly encroaching civilization?
Do they not think that they would affect what is currently inhabiting those parks? I see that this can be a real problem. Not to mention the law suits that might come if some kids tries to feed a lion and winds up being a meal.
What if the extinction of some species causes that "cure" species to evolve to fill the niche?
Let's stop the ecological guessing games.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Seems the continent has had 13,000 years for it's ecosystems to adapt to the current state of things, why screw it up with sudden introduction of species that weren't actually here in the first place?
Maybe because in most places the ecosystem has not adapted very well at all. For the last several hundred years pretty much every large predator in North America has been brought to the brink of extinction except one, humans. Sure there are some mountain lions here or there, and a few wolves (that are mostly wolf coyote hybrids now), but they are all endangered species. The life of the typical wild herd animal, like deer, usually ends with being killed by a human or by dying slowly of disease or starvation. I can't tell you how many game animals I've disposed of because half their face was rotted away by some disease and there are no predators left to kill the sick ones.
With decreasing space for animals to live, the overcrowding and resultant disease and starvation is getting much worse. Now this proposal to introduce large foreign species may or may not help the situation. What really needs to happen is a reduction in human overpopulation, but I don't see that happening anytime soon either.
You said it yourself, humans haven't just eliminated the predators, we've supplanted them. The human population is not the problem. The human unwillingness to fulful the role of the missing predators is. We should be eating the animals that aren't being eaten by packs of wolves anymore. Your anecdote about the diseased deer just proves the point: we need more predators like you to keep the deer population in check.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think it's the other way around, but whatever. And there isn't much point of being at the top of the food chain if we keep making the food chain smaller and smaller by eliminating other species, which even if we don't eat can hurt us by starving species that we eat which in turn would eat the extinct animals, etc etc
Go hug some trees.
I don't see megafauna as reproducing all willy-nilly and doing so without people noticing. Not too hard to track a big cat the size of a pony or an elephant almost twice normal size and covered in fur. We're not talking insects or kudzu, we're talking big arse creatures.
What gets to me is that this is the shotgun method of protecting wildlife. Reproduce it en masse and numbers will take care of it. Not going to happen. Impact on wildlife will be made less when we stop chowing up the countryside to put in homes because we want not only new houses but new land too. We've got plenty of cities and suburbs chock full of disused and underused land where new buildings could easily replace old, where we can easily with modern technology put in efficient dense housing that won't become slums if we truly don't want them to...
Instead we demolish farmland and forest, put in subdivisions, subdivide the properties over the decades and make it denser, then leave it behind as too old and we chow up some other forest or farm and put in another subdivision. In CT in the USA, the woods in the western hills are being sliced through at an alarming rate for the middle exec level wealthy who work in the white collar city jobs and commute home to $1M+ homes that are built up into the woods and across former farms. Meanwhile the cities they work in are falling apart and full of six-family apartments that are boarded up and with a little investment and hard work could be made into fairly spacious single-family townhouses right there.
Most of these people will as they and their kids get older simply move on the ever "newer" developments, fleeing from the cities while continuing to work in them or in office parks on the immediate periphery, fueling the developers who keep grinding the countryside up and leaving us with decreasing space for the wildlife.
Here, that is the major issue. That is what is destroying the environment. Clearing of wild places to put in expensive houses, all the societal support things that go with them, roads to get there, etc. Meanwhile we're wrongly concerned with old things like mining and so on. Those are fanciful targets of the usual socialist suspects. I'm not, I live in a city, and there's plenty of good space still here just waiting to be improved on for the good of anyone living here. But people refuse to even consider it, leave it to the poor, and move on to their formaly wild now suburban confines comfortably far from the "old places" but still near enough to make money off of them.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Geez. I have mod points and I have to give up moderating in order to respond to this. Thanks.
So, based on the fact that Mountain Lions can kill people, should we also go after dogs? According to this site, in the U.S. between 1979 and the late 1990s, over 300 people were killed by dogs. That means your family dog is much more likely to kill you than any "wild animal".
Mountain lions are moving in next door to everybody.Not me. I live in the suburbs. People can choose to live wherever they want. If you choose to live in a hurricane zone, you will have hurricanes. If you choose to live in an earthquake zone, you will have earthquakes. If you choose to live in an area where Mountain Lions, Bobcats and Alligators live, you will see those animals (BTW, there are relatives of the Mountain Lion in Florida).
If people can't handle living in an area where wild animals live, either people should learn to deal with the results of their choice in living arrangements...or they should move.
For the record, I think bringing elephants and lions here to the US is a bad idea.
"We should be eating the animals that aren't being eaten by packs of wolves anymore." ... excepting people are squeamish about eating diseased animals. Wasting disease, which is running rampant in Elk herds in the rockies is a very close cousin to mad cow disease. Though its not currently thought to be transmitable to humans, I doubt you want to go out of your way to eat Elk infected with it.
But, these scientists really don't have a clue what kind of buzz saw they would face trying to introduce foreign predators in to the U.S. Farmers and ranchers who have substantial political clout, especially with the current administration, would fight it to the death unless its in heavily fenced parks more like zoos. They need to look no further than the massive resistance there has been to protecting and reintroducing the grizzly and wolves.
I saw on the news a week or so ago states around Yellowstone are probably going to resume hunting the formerly endangered grizzly bear if they are foolish enough to wander outside the bounds of the park. Ranchers have zero tolerance for predators, and they control most of the land not in parks.
One reason elephants are endangered is they don't mesh well with farmers or any kind of civilization because its nearly impossible to stop them from demolishing farms, unless you put them in small areas with major, expensive, fencing.
@de_machina
in the U.S. between 1979 and the late 1990s, over 300 people were killed by dogs. That means your family dog is much more likely to kill you than any "wild animal".
No it doesn't. There are more than 300 times as many dogs in the United States than there are moutain lions. Dogs are more dangerous because there are more of them, not because they are more dangerous per animal. Your family dog is not more likely to kill you than a mountain lion.
Now that we've gotten past that part it would be safe to say that it would be very extremely unlikely to be killed by either a dog or a mountain lion.