lparker
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Post by lparker on Feb 11, 2012 10:35:47 GMT -5
Quoted from the credo site. I did sign this petition. >If Alberta Canada's tar sands oil fields are fully developed, an area of boreal rainforest the size of Florida will be eviscerated, leaving in its wake only giant ponds of toxic wastewater. To make up for the fact that extracting tar sands oil is threatening caribou herds by destroying vast swaths of rainforest habitat in Alberta, the Canadian government has called for strychnine poisoning and aerial shooting of thousands of wolves in areas of tar sands mining. This plan is both cruel and deeply misguided. I just signed a petition telling Canada's Prime Minister Harper to Stop Canada's planned tar sands wolf killings. Learn more and add your name here: act.credoaction.com/campaign/tar_sands_wolves/?r_by=34874-4259794-3sAmJOx&rc=paste1 <
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bushmanbilly
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Post by bushmanbilly on Feb 12, 2012 11:10:17 GMT -5
>If Alberta Canada's tar sands oil fields are fully developed, an area of boreal rainforest the size of Florida will be eviscerated, leaving in its wake only giant ponds of toxic wastewater. Bullshit!!! Get your facts right. www.oilsands.alberta.ca/reclamation.htmlI don't agree with the poisoning of the wolves. But thanks to peta and the other green groups. Fur prices are rock bottom. Very few are trapping anymore. They are over populated and are becoming a real problem. If any state would like some. Alberta would gladly send some down. They would do well in Central park!!
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bushmanbilly
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Post by bushmanbilly on Feb 12, 2012 11:28:07 GMT -5
There were wolves in most of the lower 48. What happened to them? Thanks to Alberta Yellowstone has wolves again. For how long though!!
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Sabre52
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Post by Sabre52 on Feb 12, 2012 12:15:11 GMT -5
Speaking only from a wildlife biologists point of view, wolves, being apex predators are doing quite well in a lot of areas. So much so, that with no controls on their population they are actually becoming a problem for domestic stock growers and many prey animal populations which are not hardy enough for such depredations. Wolf populations increase very rapidly when introduced into a new food base unused to their depredations . There are also just flat not enough wilds anymore to support large wolf populations. In some cases this leaves man little choice but to intervene and keep wolf populations under control just as we have to do with many problem species. It's sad as these are beautiful animals but that's just what has to be done sometimes. California where there has been a long term moratorium on mountain Lion hunting is a prime example. The lion population is now much too large for the environment left to them and they are killing pets, livestock, wiping out whole deer herds and even killing people. Government hunters are on the go 24/7 killing trouble lions and still it is not real safe in the woods these days. Sometimes man has to play the apex predator to keep these animals under control.....Mel
PS: Something sounds wrong with a story where wolves are supposedly being poisoned and shot because of tar sand development. There must be some science behind it that was not properly explained. I suspect the wolf population has increased in the area to numbers the caribou will not support. Government hunters usually don't go out and kill just for fun. I'd like to hear their reasoning before I made any kind of decision as to the correctness of this program.
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bushmanbilly
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Post by bushmanbilly on Feb 12, 2012 14:11:17 GMT -5
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lparker
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Post by lparker on Feb 12, 2012 15:11:30 GMT -5
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Sabre52
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Post by Sabre52 on Feb 12, 2012 16:56:48 GMT -5
Yeah, even though one of my specialties was wildlife management, I'm a great lover of animals. just as many hunters are. It really bothers me that here in Texas we have almost no predators compared to a lot of other states because of all the wholesale slaughter that takes place. Texas ranchers are extremely intolerant of all predators. As a result of not having the apex predators, we have massive overpopulation and habitat destruction caused by too many deer and other hoofed critters. I've always seen the job of predators to be keeping the grazers in balance and the job of man as the ultimate apex predator to be keeping nature in balance when nature fails to do so. Unfortunately due to politics and folks like PETA nuts, too many laws are being formulated that screw up things rather than help them out.
A case in point is a critter we have on a lot of on neighboring ranches, the Scimitar Horned Oryx. Due to extermination by native peoples, these animals were wiped out in Africa. But in Texas, where they are raised as a domestic hunting crop like our blackbuck, they were thriving. So many in fact that animals from Texas were taken back to Africa to try an repopulate their range. They were classified as endangered in the wild but are by no means that way in captivity. Then some asshat gal who's anti-hunting filed a lawsuit to stop all hunting of Oryx from private herds. Sounds good on the surface, but without having them as a domestic "crop" to be harvested, there's no incentive to raise them so they will eventually die out in Texas and other states and of course the ones in Africa will eventually be killed and eaten so the beautiful species will become extinct. This dumbass gal actually said she didn't care if the largest world population of Oryx in Texas becomes non existent just as long as they can't be hunted. I fact, she doesn't really give a dang about the extinction of a species. She just wants to stop commercial production for hunting. She's actually anti-hunting not pro Oryx because in Africa where everyone eats everything, there's a good chance these beautiful creatures will not survive. These laws are just stupid. As with a hunting license program, it's the hunters that actually save the animals in the long run and it's hunting license fees that preserve habitat for huge numbers of animals and plants, even non game species.
One of my great pleasures in life is being able to look out my window and see herds of magnificent blackbuck just outside my game fence. Can't see that in India and Nepal where they come from and we actually send them back there for repatriation. The little babies are adorable! I can walk to my back fence and see Scimitar Horned Oryx roaming wild and drive down the road and see a dozen kinds of African and Indian game roaming almost free. Here they thrive because they are husbanded, protected and harvested when overpopulated or too old to be good breeding stock. The hunting aspect is sad but necessary as there are no tigers or lions around here so man simply takes their place. Friggin greenie dumbasses just do not get it at all. That's what happens when amateur zealots get involved with things they do not understand....Mel
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grayfingers
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Post by grayfingers on Feb 12, 2012 18:45:46 GMT -5
I also have great fondness and respect for the top predators. Yellowstone is a great example of the struggle to come to terms with specie protection and modern realities. I was in favor of the re introduction of wolves into the park. "Officially, 1926 was the year the last wolves were killed within Yellowstone’s boundaries, and over the succeeding decades, populations of elk and other large prey animals had soared, and new growth vegetation suffered as a result. This is due to ecosystem instability when keystone predators are removed. With wolves being at the top of the food pyramid, their absence let the elk population boom out of control. Soon deciduous woody species such as upland aspen and riparian cottonwood crashed as a result of overgrazing. This affected habitat for other species as well. Moreover, coyotes tried to fill in the niche left by wolves, but were unable to control the large ungulate populations. Booming coyote numbers, furthermore, also had a negative effect on other species, particularly the red fox. Ranchers, though, remained steadfastly opposed to reintroducing a species of animal that they considered to be analogous to a plague, citing the hardships that would ensue with the potential loss of stock caused by wolves."
Most hunters were against it too they said it would ruin the elk hunting, and it turns out they were right to a large degree. The Yellowstone Elk herd that lives along the park's northern border declined by 24 percent between 2009 and 2010, according to an aerial count conducted in December. In 1995, the year wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the northern Yellowstone elk herd numbered 16,791. In 2009, biologists counted 6,070 elk in the herd. In Jan of 2011, biologists counted 4,635 elk. All told, the elk population has declined by 70 percent in the 16 years since wolf reintroduction. The large herds that roamed the nearby mountains in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana were also decimated by the wolves. I think the wolves eating the caribou are likely a more significant threat than a swath cut through a woodland. I find it difficult to believe the pipeline is the sort of threat to the wildlife or the boreal rainforest that it is portrayed to be. I mean, "the size of Florida will be eviscerated"... that is a lot of real estate, and I would need to see some documentation supporting this fantastic estimate before I can imagine it to be credible.
Bill
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bushmanbilly
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Post by bushmanbilly on Feb 12, 2012 22:05:58 GMT -5
Here your facts Bill. The map to the right shows that, while the oil sands underlie a 142,200 km2 area in north and eastern Alberta, the surface mining area is limited to a 4,800 km2 region near Fort McMurray -- 715 km2 of which has been disturbed by oil sands mining (~0.16 per cent of Alberta's boreal forest) Industry has planted more than 7.5 million tree seedlings towards reclamation efforts. 80 per cent of the oil sands are accessible by in situ methods only (bitumen is separated from the sand underground and pumped to the surface). In situ's land disturbance is 10 to 15 per cent of a similar sized mining operation and produces no tailings ponds. Florida must be a very small state if its only 4800 sq kms or 1672 sq miles. These groups should not be able to spread lies. But to many people are like sheep. They never research what they hear, just follow the one in front.
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chassroc
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Post by chassroc on Feb 13, 2012 8:25:42 GMT -5
Funny Thread..."To make up for the fact that extracting tar sands oil is threatening caribou herds by destroying vast swaths of rain forest habitat in Alberta, the Canadian government has called for strychnine poisoning and aerial shooting of thousands of wolves in areas of tar sands mining." - Certainly possible ... but that sounds like anything but a Government sponsored solution (stupid enough to be sponsored by anyone but in the us of a, I cannot imagine a politician doing or saying anything harmful to an animal, even to save another animal. You get tarred and feathered for that kind of thing)...It is Canada, not the US, so it may be possible...
This sounds (if it is real) like a great opportunity for someone to make a bunch of green!
As for the Elk...5-10years ago there were many more all over Yellowstone than there were when I last visited in 2009.
Bears are popping up everywhere in Suburbia...only a matter of time before someones little Johnny or Janie gets mauled by accident by an anxious Mama Bear.
Coyotes have made a remarkable comeback in the East and I imagine all over the country. Since they eat the deer that eat every ones tulips and rhododendrons and azaleas, they are not as much of a nuisance as they could be. An occasional pet dog or cat is disemboweled on occasion but they seem to prefer bigger prey. Cougars, fishercats, and lots of other varmints have pushed closer to civilization or civilization to them
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bushmanbilly
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Post by bushmanbilly on Feb 13, 2012 11:40:45 GMT -5
This sounds (if it is real) like a great opportunity for someone to make a bunch of green! Bingo!!
As many people know I do a lot of work in the north country. Funny thing is, the places I see the most Moose, Deer, Caribou, etc. is in the cleared areas where the oil and gas wells are. They are eating the new growth of plants. So a matter of fact, the oil and gas industry is creating better habitat for them.
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lparker
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Post by lparker on Feb 14, 2012 10:52:23 GMT -5
To go along with bushmanbilly's post and for your viewing pleasure - the following link - keep clicking the right arrow for more pics - www.panoramio.com/photo/10280048The photos sort of belie the no tailings pond thing.
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grayfingers
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Post by grayfingers on Feb 14, 2012 11:20:00 GMT -5
It does appear that this type of mining does create tailings ponds. I would say the important thing is what will be the state of the lands when they are reclaimed. So, I looked into it, and found that they are doing a good job of addressing reclamation. While posting links to photos of tailing ponds admittedly provokes a strong negative emotion, if one looks further into the story of Suncor it will be found that the lands will be reclaimed and returned to a natural state. Looks like Suncor has a pretty impressive reclamation program. The ponds and other disturbed lands will be returned to mixed wood forests and small wetlands capable of supporting a variety of plants and wildlife, thanks to their patented TRO process that will reduce or eliminate the need for future tailings ponds. Read about this and view videos here: sustainability.suncor.com/2011/en/responsible/1794.aspxBill
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Post by Hard Rock Cafe on Feb 14, 2012 14:21:55 GMT -5
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