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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I farm right next to (within 10km) pristine forest stretching for a few thousand km in a couple directions. I’ve seen plenty of wolves, but they never really come into the farming areas, and even if they do, the cattle aren’t very concerned. You have a couple hundred head together in a field, they aren’t worried about wolves, cougar or coyotes. They’d stomp them into a paste.

    We have neighbors that bitch and moan about the coyotes “killing calves”. I’ve seen plenty of coyotes chewing on dead calves, but I feel it’s pretty unlikely to have been them that killed it, they’re just cleaning up a late miscarriage that might have walked around for a while looking for a place to die. It’s almost always calves I’ve looked at and thought they weren’t going to last long.

    And there are more than enough deer, moose and elk around for these predators to go after that they would much rather take anyway, rather than risk an angry bunch of momma cows mopping them up.

    Frankly, if the price of having a healthy wildlife population means losing a few sick calves to them and a couple tonnes of grain to deer, I’m fine with it. That ecosystem benefits us in a lot of ways.