Wolves: Hunting Affects Stress, Reproduction, and Sociality

This goes to the central issue that wolves are highly social, sentient beings. They aren’t just numbers. Counting wolves as if they’re inanimate objects, to achieve the lowest common denominator, of reducing the wolf population to negligible numbers, is not only wrong, it’s bad science. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that indiscriminately killing members of wolf families, in a sick game of annual Russian Roulette, causes wolves tremendous stress. Wolves have just a 1 in 10 hunt success rate, that means their lives are not easy, even under ideal conditions.

The cruelty of hunting, especially trapping and now legal wolf/dog fighting in Wisconsin, has turned their lives into a living hell. A wolf is a wolf is a wolf perpetuates the idea that wolves are interchangeable. That if hundreds of wolves lose their lives every year in the hunts, it’s OK because wolves will just make more wolves. There is no consideration of pack structure, hierarchy or the importance of alphas leading and teaching their young. What happens to the young wolves who lose their parents at five or six months of age? What chance do they have of surviving and becoming good hunters? I think we all know the answer to that but fish and game agencies don’t care about wolf society or their social interactions. They care about their customers, the hunters and maximizing ungulate numbers to make as much money on hunting tags as possible. If they have to slaughter wolves to achieve that goal, they could care less.

I’d like to see how brave these trophy hunters would be without their high-powered weaponry, baits, traps, snares, AR-15’s, et al.  They wouldn’t last two seconds.

Exposing the Big Game

Harassed wolves show elevated levels of stress and reproductive hormones

Published on November 12, 2014 by Marc Bekoff, Ph.D. in Animal Emotions

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201411/wolves-hunting-affects-stress-reproduction-and-sociality

A study just published in the journal Functional Ecology called “Heavily hunted wolves have higher stress and reproductive steroids than wolves with lower hunting pressure” by Heather Bryan of the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and her colleagues shows that heavily hunted individuals show changes in reproductive behavior and that there is social disruption of their packs. The effects of hunting can have long-term consequences. A summary of this most important study can be read here.

To analyze stress levels, the research team studied hair samples from wolves living on the tundra/taiga from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories (n = 103) and wolves living in the boreal forests of Alberta and the Northwest Territories (n = 45). The wolves living on the…

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