Science and Scholarship Abused, and the Counter-Productive “Conservation” of Wolves in North America and Europe

Although science forms the basis of wildlife conservation in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, advocacy and inadequate scholarship have led to conservation legislation that is destroying the wolf as a species. “Wolf science” is flawed due to the denial of historical information abou...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference
Main Author: Geist , Valerius
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: eScholarship, University of California 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4sc3k5mw
Description
Summary:Although science forms the basis of wildlife conservation in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, advocacy and inadequate scholarship have led to conservation legislation that is destroying the wolf as a species. “Wolf science” is flawed due to the denial of historical information about wolves, ignoring how wolves explore new prey, ignoring long-standing research on the social organization and its changes in wolves, ignoring hybridization as a cause of the genomic extinction, the use of genetic data without a taxonomic verification of specimen, misuse of mathematics, and espousing meaningless statistics. Wolves cannot be conserved as a species in settled landscapes. So called wolf conservation in North America and in Europe is in need of reevaluation, as it is destroying a genuine canid species.