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The Dire Wolf Is Back

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41–50 of 208 posts

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#41
post #36

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

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Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#43

Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?

We have robust cloning protocols for dogs. For some reason dogs are really amenable to cloning.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#45
post #36

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

Don't farmers get reimbursed for livestock lost to natural predators?

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#46

Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editor…

In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford cars. This does not seem like a very good argument against anything new.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi-related: very few people, even capable professional writers, use "disinterested" correctly.

Can you provide an example? I'm not sure how one would use it improperly...

The short answer is that disinterested means unbiased, having no conflicts of interest, impartial. So a judge in a court should be disinterested, but not uninterested.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#48

Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.

Decimated is from Latin decimātiō, where a large group of your army would be split into groups of 10, each group would draw straws, and the shortest straw would be stoned to death by the other 9. A completely brutal form of military punishment for capital offenses such as cowardice. It is not really adequately captured by reducing it to "kill one in every 10".

Wikipedia says it may be ahistorical though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

It also notes "In modern English, the word is used most commonly not to mean a destruction of a tenth but rather annihilation."

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#49
post #36

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#50

Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?

From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :

> Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, “It’s been almost twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were established, and those culture conditions have not worked for other bird species, even ones that are really closely related, like quail.” She added that, despite the dearth of related research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-egg precursors in birds: “We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we can start doing some migration assays”—a technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of endangered birds. The team had already identified some species that could use the help.

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