A smattering of links

[sholio]

From Twitter via Discord: Youtube will reset unlisted videos older than 2017 to private unless you opt out. Link has instructions. Most of my vids are like this, so I went through the instructions and did the opt-out thing - with some difficulty along the way, because it turns out you have to be logged into the gmail account that "owns" the Youtube account you're trying to reset when you make the request, and it does not make it AT ALL obvious if you're not, since you can be simultaneously logged into one account on Youtube and a different one on Gmail. My Youtube vidder account belongs to a very old Google account that I never use anymore, and I ended up having to go find the login information for gmail on that account in order for it to work. It all worked out in the end, though.

Kind of a cool article (might be paywalled; a lot of the ADN articles are): Man's job is basically being a nuisance human to bears. (Not the actual article title, which is "Dogs put to work in Girdwood in attempt to reduce bear conflicts with residents".) This guy and his three Karelian bear dogs harass bears (humans and dogs are both trained for it; it's less of a bonkers idea than it sounds) to convince them that the suburbs are too much work and they would be happier in the woods, where there are no annoying humans with dogs! Like Orion said when I told him about it, this guy should get hazard pay. He also educates locals about bear behavior and teaches them to secure their trash and otherwise avoid preventable bear-human conflicts.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I know at least one person who has that job, but with wolves.

[ratcreature]

I wish this would work with boar. Wild pigs are a destructive menace, and entirely too happy to settle in between humans. Even getting shot and eaten in significant numbers doesn't seem to make them shy, because they are apparently smart enough to know that the average human isn't going to shoot them. In my city hunters kill hundreds of them every year, and they still rampage through gardens semi-regularly.

[recessional]

It's partially smarts and partially that as a species their survival strategy against threats is as much "stand and fight" as "run away", which is the opposite of wolves and black bear and pigs are even more Like That than grizzlies.

So with bears and wolves their entire wiring (to be quick and dirty with my wording) is "there's a stressful thing here, avoid it", whereas boar are wired to be at least as much "there's a threat here attack it".

Makes them pretty dangerous for sure.

[ratcreature]

Though to be fair, considering how many of them there are, and how close they settle among humans, there are surprisingly few cases of serious injuries here, despite a fairly huge increase in their number since WWII. Every now and then you hear of somebody getting injured, but for the most part it's just property damage and boar being a nuisance.

[sholio]

Yeah, this is actually a thought that I've had about predators vs. large herbivores in general, which is that predators have an extremely well-honed sense of "is this too big/too dangerous to be worth attacking," which makes scaring them away relatively easy most of the time, whereas big herbivores expect to be attacked so they're just like "Yeah? BRING IT! BRING IT!!!"

[sholio]

Oh, that's really cool!

It seems like wolves would be a bit easier to scare, but maybe this shows what I know about wolves.

[leesa_perrie]

Good to know about the YouTube thing. As for the guy and his dog, hazard pay and lots of doggie treats for sure!

[sholio]

Ha, yeah definitely! (Actually there was a neat little bit in the article about the guy handing out treats to the locals to give to his dogs so they won't be afraid of the dogs, which I thought was really cute!)

[sovay]

This guy and his three Karelian bear dogs harass bears (humans and dogs are both trained for it; it's less of a bonkers idea than it sounds) to convince them that the suburbs are too much work and they would be happier in the woods, where there are no annoying humans with dogs!

I love that the legacy of bear-hunting can be redirected to bear-annoying, specifically with the goal of keeping the bear from getting killed.

[sholio]

I know! Humans are really delightfully ingenious sometimes.

[sheron]

This is neat!

[sholio]

I know! I also read that they do this in some national parks to keep the bears from getting too intrusive on visitor areas.

[yhlee]

Oh wow, that's amazing. Nuisance human and dogs FTW!

[sholio]

Official job: annoyer of bears. :D

[yalumesse]

Real classy, YouTube :( Thanks for spreading the word!

That's... a fascinating job and good on him. Wow.

[sholio]

Frikkin' youtube. Why can't we have nice things??

And yeah! It was a cool thing to learn about.

[lilacsigil]

That's so smart with the bears! Keep them away, minimise conflicts, leading to happier bears and happier people. I'm really enjoying how many wildlife management solutions turn out to be "dog" - I live near where Maremma dogs are used to guard penguins from foxes, and they're now getting them to guard bandicoots.

[sholio]

Oh, how neat to know! Yeah, it's really interesting to me that for all our technology and ability to devise clever solutions to things, there are a lot of jobs that just can't be done better than dogs can do them.

[xparrot]

The sister was telling me that Yellowstone has rangers firing paintball guns at wolves (maybe bears too?) for the same reasons! What a different sort of job, sounds like an art as much as a science.

...I have to confess that I first saw your post when I'd first woken up and brain was not fully engaged and I read "Man's job is basically being a nuisance human to bears" and was like...human males evolved to bother bears? how even??? XD

[sholio]

I mean, that would be an amazingly specific ecological niche, but nature has done stranger things. XD

... oh, speaking of strange side branches of human evolution, have you read about the honeyguide birds that appear to have co-evolved with humans/protohuman ancestors, with the two species learning to interact so that honeyguides can show humans where bee colonies are, and in turn rely on humans to open the hive so they can eat the beeswax? I found out about this just recently and it's so cool - I mean, obviously we can't know for sure, but it's so wild to think that these birds might have been doing this with us all the way back when we were H. erectus, and just kept doing it with modern humans right down to the present day. I think it's especially mindblowing for me because we tend not to think of humans as part of the ecosystem, in general, except as something that damages it - but of course we are part of it, and we have our ecological niche and species that co-evolved with us. It's so interesting to think about.

[xparrot]

Oh wow, that's cool! I knew about honeyguides but I thought leading any random creatures to the bee colonies was their thing, I didn't know they were human-specialized! There are a lot of animals now who are evolving to live in human-created environments and things, but yeah, it's neat that we also were always part of the ecoysystems too...