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by Scottie Westfall

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Why mesopredator numbers have to be controlled

January 28, 2014 by retrieverman

fox defending its kill

There is a certain amount of ignorance that exists among urban dwellers, especially those in the United Kingdom, a nation that has killed off all its large predatory mammals and left the countryside to the red fox and the European badger.

This ignorance sees animals like red foxes as noble creatures on the same level as dogs, which means that it is inherently immoral to kill them for any reason.

Anyone who kills a fox in the UK is automatically demonized to almost the same level as a pedophile.

I find this utterly shocking.  I have never killed a fox, but members of my family certainly have. During the ’60’s and ’70’s, my father’s family made a decent income trapping and shooting foxes for their fur. These foxes financed long industrial strikes, which I thought most of the socialist Brits would support. These actually were red foxes, whose pelts uplifting the plight of the working class, which also financed my grandfather’s relatively generous retirement, a lot of which was actually spent on improving habitat for wildlife.

My grandpa knew the red fox inside and out.  He knew just where to place his traps, and he also knew how to modify them to hold the fox as humanely as possible. It was not about the torture of the fox. It was about catching and holding it as soundly as possible.

When fox numbers were so strictly controlled through this profitable culling, there were plenty of game birds around. Ruffed grouse existed in numbers that I cannot even imagine today. Now, it’s certainly true that ruffed grouse prefer early succession forests to mature ones, and because timber prices are so low, most of the forests have been allowed to mature beyond their optimum harvest date.

But I don’t think that having uncontrolled fox numbers is actually a good thing for ruffed grouse numbers.

Of course, red foxes are being controlled through coyote predation, and coyotes don’t really waste their time on ruffed grouse– too hard to catch and too small a meal.

If coyotes control fox numbers, then it will be likely be a good thing for ruffed grouse.

What I’ve just described to you is something that is well-understood in the ecological literature. This particular case, of course, has not been confirmed in any study, but I certainly do think it’s worth examining. (It has been confirmed with ducks, coyotes, and foxes, however.)

This phenomenon is called the mesopredator release hypothesis, and it is actually been confirmed time and again in the wildlife management and ecology literature.

The hypothesis goes like this:

Historically, our ecosystems were full of large, slowly reproducing predators– wolves, tigers, cougars, great whites etc. These are the so-called apex predat

And these predators hunted big game, but they also hunted smaller predators that reproduce relatively quickly, like foxes, raccoons, stingrays, etc.

These smaller predators evolved to have very high reproduction rates. It was the only way they could keep their numbers going through a constant onslaught of predation from the bigger predators.

The smaller predators hunted smaller prey, and these prey animals were often too small for the bigger ones to waste time chasing.

So the bigger predators kept the smaller ones under control, just as the smaller ones had evolved to produce more and more offspring. Smaller predators did not significantly reduce populations of smaller animals because their numbers were controlled by the big ones.

Over the past 10,000 years, man has waged war against the bigger predators. We’ve killed off nearly all the lions in Asia, as well as almost all of the cheetahs. Wolves are gone from much of Europe and the United States. Both wolves and Eurasian lynx are gone from Great Britain, and since foxhunting has been banned, the only thing controlling foxes are cars and shooters. And mange, of course.

In this world, mesopredators are still reproducing at the same level they always were, but nothing is controlling their numbers.

Small prey species suddenly find themselves experiencing high levels of predation, and their numbers begin to drop.

At this point, we are never going to have the same ecosystems that we had before. We are not going to have vast populations of wolves controlling the fox numbers any time soon.

So the solution to this problem is to cull them.

And that’s why I don’t denigrate the fur trade. It’s why I don’t cry about foxhunters and foxhounds. It’s also why I don’t worship at the altar of feral cat protection. Feral cats are part of the mesopredator problem as well, and they might actually be the worst offender after the red fox.

There are valid scientific reasons why we must control the numbers of mesopredators, and being so squeamish about controlling foxes or cats or raccoons is being more of an animal rights fanatic than it is being a conservationist.

Animal rights is actually not about ecology, and the way it is logic falls,  the right of any animal to life trumps sound wildlife management.

That’s insanity.

 

 

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Posted in wild dogs, wildlife | Tagged Mesopredator release hypothesis, red fox | 16 Comments

16 Responses

  1. on January 28, 2014 at 11:14 am massugu

    One of your best posts to date Scottie.


  2. on January 28, 2014 at 11:55 am Karen Myers

    The return of coyotes to the east is interesting. They’re filling an alpha predator role, in the absence of the wolf, and have gotten larger in the process, making it easier to prey on deer. They’re also doing a good job of predation on red fox.


  3. on January 28, 2014 at 3:20 pm cyborgsuzy

    Good post. I especially appreciate that you mention marine predators, which are often overlooked in these discussions.


    • on January 28, 2014 at 7:09 pm retrieverman

      http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wild-Things-Were-Ecological/dp/1596916249

      This is discussed at length in this book.

      The author lives in West Virginia.


  4. on January 28, 2014 at 5:05 pm UrbanCollieChick

    Nice to see you posting.

    I have no problem with mesopredator management. I fully admit that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the traps as being possible to humanely use.

    I know you described it once. I’ll try to search the archives for that description. Trying to see how the trap can hold tightly enough so that the fox cannot escape yet not be painful. And of course, this is under the condition that the traps are checked often. On that note, I’m generally the first to say that a few rotten apples should not be allowed to spoil the whole bunch ( legislate a practice out of existence), but man, in this case, how can it NOT be a torment for trapped animals if someone skips a check or a day or two because they forgot, got sick, had to leave the area suddenly and unexpectedly, etc.

    Would rather see them shot.


    • on January 28, 2014 at 6:34 pm Marg

      Yes I agree with you on the trapping, I really hate it, I prefer to see the animal shot rather than seeing the fear and pain in its eyes. Although I must admit with the import of rabbits and foxes to this country (Oz), they have both become a scourge and a massive pest in the countryside. Anytime i take my dogs out, i will always see dozens of bunnies and at least a pair of foxes. In fact there are so many foxes that they live quite happily in the city and suburbs. Retrieverman’s granddad wouldn’t have had to look too far to find them.


      • on January 29, 2014 at 9:25 am UrbanCollieChick

        From what I’ve heard from people, trapping as Scottie describes doesn’t hold a candle to the poison baits in Australia that still get used. Despite the alternative of the 1080 baits, the use of strychnine by many still remains and that’s a horrid way to go.

        And at least you can find the trapped non-target animals and release them. If you poison a non-target, well, too late.


        • on January 29, 2014 at 7:10 pm Marg

          Yes baiting is horrid, and i totally detest it for the obvious reasons. As much as I hate it, I understand the reasons for it. However, I don’t think you realise the enormity of the problem here. We are not talking about a rabbit here and there, which you can shoot or trap every day, and that would take care of the problem, we are talking about plague proportions. In a ten minute walk the other day, I counted 22 rabbits that crossed the path I was on. That’s in 10 minutes, and I counted only the ones that directly crossed my path, I didn’t even count the ones I could see within 10 metres from the track I was on.

          During the 20’s the rabbit population grew to about 10 billion ! Myxomatosis was used and it worked until they became immune to it. We are looking at about 200 million bunnies at the moment. Remember most of Australia is arid, so they establish themselves in the places where livestock feed and native wildlife populate. They not only eat any grass and seeds that livestock would eat, but they eat the very food our native animals need to survive and they also contribute to land erosion. So we are actually talking about an environmental nightmare. So baiting, as horrid as it is can only help the problem, it doesn’t eradicate the problem. And we simply do not have enough predator animals to control the situation. Some of our farms here (stations) are the size of small countries, farmers simply do not have the resources or the time to travel around to release non-targeted animals.

          Therefore, UrbanCollieChick what would you suggest?


    • on January 29, 2014 at 12:57 pm retrieverman

      I have to tell you that no trapper worth his salt would leave a line unattended. There is a very strong code of ethics, and if you don’t follow the rules, they often won’t let you sell at their auctions.


  5. on January 28, 2014 at 8:07 pm chervilmeadow

    Most British people are delighted when they see lovely red foxes. Not enough species made it back after the ice age and before we became islands.
    Foxes have useful attributes in that they help control rats and mice and, especially in built up areas, they do a good job of eating discarded food waste. Of course they can be a minor nuisance in some circumstances but not enough to consider them to be much of a “pest”. The main thing is they are a beautiful part of our wildlife and are cherished for that by most people.

    In circumstances where they are seen as a local nuisance they are sometimes shot. However, foxes naturally control their own density of numbers and they themselves without ‘help’ from us do not allow their territories to get seriously overloaded.
    It is sad, given the lack of animal diversity here that our ancestors killed off all the wolves and lynx. Switzerland is an example of how a small country can reintroduce predators without the world as we know it coming to an end.
    We certainly need a natural way of controlling the deer population here and some say that reintroducing wolves and lynx could achieve this, but that’s a big issue for discussion of course.


  6. on January 29, 2014 at 6:18 am Jen Robinson

    When I took ecology we learned a lot of theory in 101, and then in the 200 and 300 level courses they taught us that reality was often more complex than theory. I’m sure there are places where elimination of mesopredators has allowed rebound of small herbivores and ground-nesting birds. But when I look around me I wonder if that’s always the case.
    I live in a low density area in North Central Florida . .. in my settlement there are fewer than 100 houses, most properties are one to five acres… heavily wooded for miles beyond with a lot of swamp. The neighbors let chickens and meat rabbits run free with little or no loss to predation. Occasionally a hawk takes out a chicken or bunny, but foxes, coons, feral cats, and possums are not a problem. The scarcity of mesopredators is not linked to rebound of the ground fauna. Eg., the oldtimers remember hunting quail around here. The quail are gone. Small bird populations are depauperate: the iconic mockingbird no longer sings in every garden and gardens aren’t ravaged by rabbits or rodents. Armadillos are doing ok. The specie that seems to be near plague numbers is the black vulture. The bald eagle isn’t doing badly either . .. so I don’t think the problem is toxicity.
    Will have to give Stoltzenburg a read . . . maybe he has an answer.


    • on January 29, 2014 at 12:43 pm retrieverman

      No one said it was “always the case.”

      You put words in my mouth regularly. I don’t appreciate it.


      • on January 29, 2014 at 6:16 pm Jen Robinson

        I’m sorry you took my comment personally. But I did not say YOU said it was always the case….I simply wondered, rhetorically, if Stoltzenburg’s hypothesis was always the case. I genuinely want to know why the ecosystem I see every day is balanced, or out of balance, in the way it is.

        Pointing out exceptions a hypothesis is a mainstay of progress in science.


  7. on January 29, 2014 at 4:32 pm YarnCrow

    I have a question for you in regards to the feral cat issue: what do you think of programs that spay/nuter feral cats? What about areas where most of the feral cats can’t reproduce, and just kinda…wanter?


    • on January 29, 2014 at 7:44 pm retrieverman

      Not a big fan at all.

      https://retrieverman.net/2010/12/02/feral-cats-cause-17-billion-in-damages-to-bird-populations/

      They wander and they kill and they are vectors for disease.


      • on January 30, 2014 at 9:05 am YarnCrow

        oh wow, I had no idea. I’ve never been super vocal about feral cat protection, but I do make sure none of the strays die due to weather or starvation. (I’m most likely to take them to a shelter where they can be put down humanely) Thanks for linking me to that!



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