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New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

economist.com

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Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#41

Post by robbrown451 »

rwhitman wrote: post #40

In eastern Los Angeles, coyotes are everywhere , to the point where in some areas you run into them constantly day or night. They're stealthy - silent and very calculating. You can tell many of them are part domestic dog and they don't seem phased by proximity to people and appear to understand the workings of the city to some extent. I have seen the mentioned looking both ways when crossing roads, and also use of si…

If they are really as stealthy as you say, the last thing they will do is be aggressive toward humans.

From an evolutionary perspective, I can't imagine a worse strategy than hunting and eating humans.

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#42

Post by igravious »

eigenvector wrote: post #16
davidw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist is worth the subscription. You know how you often read about something you know in the media and think ... "if they are getting this wrong, what else are they getting wrong?". I've noticed it happens quite a bit less with The Economist, and they write about a fairly broad range of subjects.

Quite the contrary, in writing concisely about a broad range of complex topics the Economist often passes off opinion or conjecture as fact and analysis. Compare their writing on the domestic politics of any country besides the US and UK to that country's own media and you will find it disappointingly shallow.

According to http://store.economist.com/FAQ.aspx > The Economist is published weekly, 51 times a year, with the Christmas double issue remaining on sale for two weeks. The issue is dated Saturday and goes on sale each Friday.

I know from reading it semi-regularly that it comments on significant economic/political developments from around the globe. It does this by breaking the world in regions (Europe, Asia, Africa, Americas) and then choosing to the stories from that region. Elections, power struggles, wars, economic fortunes, social/political movements, biographical sketches. The Economist also has special features on a weekly basis that cover global topics in depth, could be Bitcoin one week, renewable energy the next, the €zone crisis another week, also scientific topics.

By necessity (because it is published weekly and because its scope is global) the regular news stories are not in depth but I wouldn't therefore call them shallow. They are condensed is the word I'd use. Maybe they lose a bit of nuance but that's understandable.

When they do scientific and technical articles I find that their fact-checking and research seems to frequently attain a very high quality. People have commented on this feature of The Economist here on HN. Only The New Yorker seems to be more fastidious. What you call opinion or conjecture is actually their editorial stance§. The Economist is unashamedly biased. They believe in the free markets and I would say have a very liberal (in the British/European sense of the word liberal) philosophical outlook. They often defend their values. To have values is to be biased. What's worse I think are publications that report the news and pretend they're unbiased, when you can tell they're not either by sins of omission or misreporting whether deliberate or not and slanted recounting.

§ I personally don't share their worldview, I am more socialist than they but I recognise that disagreement on values isn't the same as that "well, that's just, like, your _opinion_ man"

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#43

Post by abrookewood »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #13

One outcome of this interbreeding is that these animals have lost their fear of people, but they retain their predatory instincts, making them quite dangerous. There are coyotes in the northern part of Nova Scotia that have attacked lone hikers. A woman was killed, in fact a few years ago, and there have been numerous scary encounters in which the animal creeps closer and closer to a wary human, much like a predator…

Well in Australia, death by horse (including falls) accounts for about 20 people a year and death by bee accounts for around 10 .. I don't think there's much to worry about from this hybrid.

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#44

Post by robbrown451 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I find these stories intriguing. Several have come together over the last decade or so, this one, the bear hunt in Florida because of too many bears, the Burmese Pythons in the Everglades eating everything, mountain lions living in many parts of the Bay Area near people, the rat explosion in NYC. All wildlife finding a niche in the urban and suburban world we've created and retaking territory originally ceded during…

"Once we become the hunted what then?"

Then they will be wiped out like every other large animal in the history of the world that has significantly threatened humans. Next question?

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#45

Post by igravious »

jobu wrote: post #20
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #13

One outcome of this interbreeding is that these animals have lost their fear of people, but they retain their predatory instincts, making them quite dangerous. There are coyotes in the northern part of Nova Scotia that have attacked lone hikers. A woman was killed, in fact a few years ago, and there have been numerous scary encounters in which the animal creeps closer and closer to a wary human, much like a predator…

> We just don't want them stalking our children in the local park. Exactly. I'm all for conservation, so long as it doesn't lead to humans becoming part of the food chain again.

Sharks kill humans annually. So do big cats. And snakes. What are we going to do? Shoot all these on sight? Predate to extinction (and not even for their nutritional value) those species that harm us in even the slightest way? I oppose that. No thanks. That's not the type of world I want to live in. I want to co-exist with these amazing creatures, not drive them to extinction, or only have them alive in captivity.

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#46

Post by igravious »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28
posnet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that story, I think it was on the same site that had the piece on the Midwest entrepreneur who recently closed a successful round A for his oversized magnet company.

That's the company that the WSJ described as "profits that seemed to hang in the air, before falling off a cliff"? Associated Coyote Magnetic Enterprises - was that the name? What was their stock symbol?

Their stock ticker symbol was a rather odd one, wasn't it? At least I found it so. I still don't understand it.

"HELP!" I think it was.

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#47

Post by igravious »

transfire wrote: post #14

Technically not a new species , rather a new subspecies .

This puzzled me as well. Do we not have a word for this? Is _subspecies_ really the word? In linguistics mutually intelligible but distinct `languages' are called dialects. Similarly is there a term for mutually interbreedable but distinct `species'?

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#48

Post by creshal »

robbrown451 wrote: post #41
rwhitman wrote: post #40

In eastern Los Angeles, coyotes are everywhere , to the point where in some areas you run into them constantly day or night. They're stealthy - silent and very calculating. You can tell many of them are part domestic dog and they don't seem phased by proximity to people and appear to understand the workings of the city to some extent. I have seen the mentioned looking both ways when crossing roads, and also use of si…

If they are really as stealthy as you say, the last thing they will do is be aggressive toward humans. From an evolutionary perspective, I can't imagine a worse strategy than hunting and eating humans.

> From an evolutionary perspective, I can't imagine a worse strategy than hunting and eating humans.

Being an aphrodisiac according to traditional Chinese medicine probably tops that.

Re: New species combining wolf, coyote, and dog emerges in eastern North America

#49

Post by jmnicolas »

igravious wrote: post #45
jobu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just don't want them stalking our children in the local park. Exactly. I'm all for conservation, so long as it doesn't lead to humans becoming part of the food chain again.

Sharks kill humans annually. So do big cats. And snakes. What are we going to do? Shoot all these on sight? Predate to extinction (and not even for their nutritional value) those species that harm us in even the slightest way? I oppose that. No thanks. That's not the type of world I want to live in. I want to co-exist with these amazing creatures, not drive them to extinction, or only have them alive in captivity.

This kind of reasoning is fine until YOUR child get killed ...
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