The Importance of Being an Omega

This is from one of my causes on Facebook. Looks like wolf packs need Omegas. Question is, do human packs need Omegas too?

Omega wolf clowning around.

The Endearing Omega Wolf…..

Looking at the big picture and the long view, the lowest ranking wolf—the omega wolf—may actually be the “cornerstone wolf” — keeping the pack together and peaceful.

Omegas have many jobs right down to their harmonious howling; able to reach high tones and low tones the omega wolf brings true harmony to a round of howling. Omegas often use this ability of many voices to make the pack sound larger than it really is in order to discourage competing packs from entering their territory.

When skirmishes occur within the pack, (as happens with all families who are together 24/7!), the omega is fast to attract attention toward itself by acting the ‘clown’ using instinctive and learned body postures, facial expressions, and vocal sounds which calms the situation and restores harmony.

Omegas are also always happy to play with and ‘sit’ the pups!

Although the omega is sometimes referred to as the “Cinderella wolf” for it’s low rank, all of it’s work, and feeding last….omegas certainly seem to be the mortar holding the pack together; always willing to ‘take one for the team’!

Stop the House Interior Funding Bill

A mail I got from the Defenders of Wildlife, a group I support. I don’t really understand why environmentalists vote Republican. If you’re an environmentalist who votes Republican, why don’t you tell us what’s going through your head. The Republican Party is a viciously, savagely, brutally anti-environmental party, and they have been for 30 years now, since Reagan.

If you like to fish and hunt, why vote Republican? I don’t get it. Fishing and hunting depends on open, clean and wild areas for the fish and animals to live in. Republicans destroy rivers and lakes and wreck any wild land that they can find.

Now, if you’re an anti-environmentalist and vote rightwing, I respect that. You are a man of principles, and you are sticking to them. But a fisherman, a hunter, and environmentalist, who votes rightwing? You need to have your head examined.

Denham, the guy who wants to kill the restoration of the salmon run in the San Joaquin River, is my congressman. He’s as reactionary as they come; he’s more or less a Tea Partier. People don’t understand California. The Whites here (and some of the others) are very rightwing. The only liberals are on the coast. Inland, in the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, the Great Basin, the North Coast, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades is very White and very, very rightwing. By the way, all of this slashing and cutting is being done under the rubric of deficit reduction.

The House of Representatives has left town for their summer recess, but not before unveiling a barrage of new anti-wildlife provisions in the Interior spending bill.

These provisions threaten wild Mexican gray wolves and endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles with extinction and pose a significant threat of increased injury and death for gentle manatees.

We must stop them.

Some in Congress seem bound and determined to unravel basic protections for some of our most vulnerable wildlife…

* Extinct Mexican gray wolves. Republican Representative Steve Pearce (NM) has introduced an amendment to end lobo recovery efforts, essentially dooming the 50 remaining Mexican gray wolves in the wild to extinction.
* Crushed sea turtles. Republican Representative Blake Farenthold (TX) has proposed blocking efforts to reduce the speed limits on beaches where threatened and endangered sea turtles – already reeling from the effects of last year’s BP oil disaster – nest.
* Wounded manatees. Boat strikes are one of the leading causes of death for Florida’s threatened manatees, but Republican Representative Richard Nugent (FL) wants to block a Fish and Wildlife Service rule to prevent boat collisions and end the hazing of these gentle sea cows.
* Dead salmon. Representative Republican Jeff Denham (CA) has introduced an amendment to block restoration of salmon in the San Joaquin River.
* A path to extinction for lesser prairie chickens and dunes sagebrush lizards. Republican Representatives Pearce (NM) and Randy Neugebauer (TX) are fighting to prohibit vital Endangered Species Act protections for these highly vulnerable animals.
* A lawless border zone. Republican Representatives Paul Gosar (AZ) and Rob Bishop (UT) have proposed amendments that would exempt the border patrol from laws and regulations that protect imperiled wildlife and federal conservation lands like our national parks and wildlife refuges.

But that’s not all. The bill also proposes deep cuts in funding for our National Wildlife Refuges and key conservation programs to keep our imperiled wildlife and wild lands safe.

Wolverines in the Upper Midwest

Repost from the old site.

Separate posts on this blog deal extensively with wolverines in Oregon, Washington, Idaho (here and here), Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, Nevada and New Mexico. There are also five posts on the wolverine in California.

This post was split off from an earlier post that got too large, California Wolverine Rediscovered After 85 Years. This particular post will deal with the question of wolverines in the Upper Midwest. Until recently, wolverines had been extinct in the Upper Midwest for 85-200 years.

However, one was photographed recently in Michigan. Furthermore, there have been some tantalizing sightings in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and even a few in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri in recent years. It is distinctly possible the wolverines may be reclaiming some of their historical territory in the Upper Midwest. If so, this is fascinating indeed.

In 2004, a wolverine was photographed in Ubly, Michigan, 90 miles north of Detroit. They were extirpated from Michigan almost 200 years ago.

DNA testing of this wolverine showed that it was from Alaska. How it got from Alaska to Michigan is anyone’s guess. On March 14, 2010, this wolverine was found dead in Sanilac County, Michigan, south of where it was originally sighted in Ubly.

There has been one other sighting in from lower Michigan. A wolverine was sighted around 1998-2000 in Tawas, Michigan.

The reason it could have come down is because there are wolverine sightings on the Upper Peninsula, and I believe they exist there. Or possibly it could have come from Southern Ontario near Port Huron, though that area is densely populated.

The sightings on the Upper Peninsula have been in Delta County, Tahquamenon Falls State Park and the Keweenaw Peninsula. I assume that the Upper Peninsula population came from Ontario, possibly across the St. Mary’s River, if it freezes over in wintertime.

A forest road in Delta County, Michigan. This road is in Escanaba State Forest. A wolverine was sighted here in an unverified sighting sometime between 1999-2004. During this period, there was about one wolverine sighting a year in Michigan, all from the Upper Peninsula.The forests here have been changed massively from 100 years ago, when most of the White Pine was logged off. I assume what we have here is Eastern second-growth forest coming back in after the old growth was logged off. This second-growth explosion is fueling an increase in wildlife numbers, especially deer, all over the East Coast.

Tahquamenon Falls in Tahquamenon Falls State Park. This area is located at the far east end of the UP near Ontario. The town of Paradise is nearby, as is Whitefish Bay. If the St. Mary’s River is frozen over, wolverines may well come down from Ontario to the UP. The part of Ontario near Sault Saint Marie is pretty sparsely populated. An unverified sighting of a wolverine was reported here in 2002.

There was also an unverified wolverine sighting in the UP on November 21, 2001 at 3 PM, crossing Highway M-64 1 mile south of Silver City in Ontonagon County.

There has been a rash of wolverine sightings lately around Babbitt, Minnesota, which is near Ely in the far northeastern part of the state near Canada. A tiny lynx population has recently also been confirmed there. The sightings around Babbitt appear to be genuine. Babbitt is surrounded by the Superior National Forest and there are frequent sightings of bears and even wolves in the area, even inside city limits.

There was also a sighting on Koochiching County on the Minnesota border with Canada in 1982. That sighting was deemed credible. In addition, there was one documented sighting in northeastern Minnesota between 1961-1995, but details are lacking.

There have been reports of dog and horse kills in and around Rollag, Minnesota lately. Certain things about the killings indicate that a wolverine may be doing this. Rollag is far to the north, getting up near the North Woods. It is east of and not far from Fargo, North Dakota.

In 1974 there was a report of a wolverine in a hay field in north-central Minnesota, near the North Woods.

There is also a report of a wolverine captured on a security camera at a Ford dealership in the town of Zumbrota in Southeast Minnesota. This land is very much prairie. The last positive record of a wolverine in Minnesota was from 1922 in Itasca County.

Old State Route 52 north of Zumbrota, Minnesota. It’s hard to believe that wolverines inhabit such terrain. Wolverines are recolonizing their old habitat on the US prairie. Why?

Many have questioned whether wolverines were actually common in prairies or if prairies merely served as population sinks. It is looking more and more like prairies are a natural home for wolverines, strange as it may seem. If these reports are accurate, it means that wolverines are re-colonizing Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and possibly also Iowa, which is fantastic news!

Prairie Island (Sioux) Indian Reservation near Zumbrota, Minnesota. Is it possible that wolverines in the past preyed on the vast buffalo herds of prairie, perhaps especially on dead buffaloes?

The occurrence of the wolverine in Wisconsin is very rare but documented. A wolverine was photographed on top of a woodpile in Green Lake County, Wisconsin in recent years. There are also recent sightings in the Black River Falls area and to the north. A 2003 sighting in Lafayette County in the far south of the state was regarded as credible by the the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Furthermore, we received a number of undocumented sightings by email to this site. One man grew up in Land O’ Lakes in far northern Wisconsin on the border with Michigan in an area known as the North Woods. This is an area of very thick, wild forest and swamps. There are supposedly many wolves, bears and wolverines in this part of Wisconsin.

In 1982, he saw three wolves in his front yard. In 1990, they treed 22 different bears in a single day while training bear dogs. They also had a frightening standoff with a wolverine on that day. From about 1983-1995, when he engaged in frequent deer hunting, he saw one or more wolverines every year.

In September 1990, a wolverine was seen several times over two weeks. The last time he saw one was in 2006 near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. All sightings took place between 1983-2006 in the North Woods approximately between Rhinelander and Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin. The bear density in this region is said to be incredible, or at least it was 20 years ago (Bangs 2009).

There have been a few unverified sightings of wolverines in North Dakota recently. In 2004, there was an unverified sighting of a wolverine near Minot. The observer watched it for a good five minutes. In 1988, two wolverines were seen along the Little Missouri River in the Badlands of far western North Dakota by a very experienced fur trapper.

There have also been wolverine sightings in South Dakota in the past 30 years. There was a verifiable wolverine sighting in the south-central portion of the state in 1961.

There were reports some years ago of a “black animal” going south through eastern Iowa killing dogs. It may have been a wolverine. A female wolverine was shot dead by a farmer on May 21, 1960 in a cornfield in central Iowa. She was infected with Trichinella spiralis, a parasite. No one quite knew how she ended up in central Iowa. However, one report said that this wolverine had been transported into the state in 1960.

Incredibly enough, there have been a number of wolverine sightings in Nebraska in recent years. All sightings have been in northern Nebraska near the South Dakota border. In particular, wolverines have been repeatedly sighted in and around Antelope and Knox Counties in far northeastern Nebraska near the Missouri River and the South Dakota border.

This area is near Louis and Clark Lake and the Santee Sioux Indian Reservation. In this area, there have been repeated sightings along the Verdigre and Niobrara Rivers.

Photo of the area of NE Nebraska around the Niobrara, Verdigre and Elkhorn Rivers where there have been numerous wolverine sightings. That is probably the Verdigre River in the foreground.

There has also been one sighting north of Gordon in northwestern Nebraska on the headwaters of Wounded Knee Creek near the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This area is east of the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska, now the scene of a famous fight over selling booze to Pine Ridge Indians.

A view of the terrain around Whiteclay, Nebraska. A wolverine was sighted on the South Dakota border about 17 miles east of here.

The first Grey Wolf in 94 years was seen recently in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It was a lone male. The UP, Minnesota and Wisconsin all have healthy populations. The Black Bear and wolf populations in Minnesota have shown dramatic increases in recent years and there is now a healthy population of over 25 lynx in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for the first time in 30 years.

In other great news along similar lines, an Eastern Grey Wolf, the first in 160 years, was detected in Massachusetts. It killed over a dozen lambs before the farmer shot it to death. The killing was probably justified, but it is unfortunate that the first wolf in the state in over 150 years got shot to death. There will probably be more wolves coming to the state after this one, though.

Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.

References

Aubry, K. B., McKelvey, K. S., Copeland, J. P. 2007. Distribution and Broadscale Habitat Relations of the Wolverine in the Contiguous United States. Journal of Wildlife Management 71(7): 148-158.

Bangs, Ray. 2009. Personal communication.Haugen, A. O. 1961. Wolverine in Iowa. Journal of Mammalogy 42: 546-547.Jackson, H. T. 1922. Wolverine in Itasca County, Minnesota. Journal of Mammalogy 3:53.

Zimmermann, W. J., Biester, H. E., Schwarte, L. H., Hubbard, E. D. 1962. Trichinella spiralis in Iowa Wildlife during the Years 1953 to 1961. The Journal of Parasitology, 48:3:1, pp. 429-432.

Libertarianism – The Enemy of all Non-Human Life on Earth

As several posts on Occidental Dissent make clear, libertarianism (and its mainstream congener, neoliberalism) is utterly incompatible with the preservation of any non-human and non-domesticated or non-utilitarian life forms. Libertarians like to throw up weird scenarios whereby preserving wildlife, wild spaces and wild places would somehow be more economically viable than exterminating them, exploiting them, and devastating them.

The problem is that this never works out in praxis. Even when we environmentalists produce reports showing that preserving forests and meadows is worth way more than chopping them down or ruining them with cattle, 100% of libertarians always line up with exploiters. I’ve been reading them forever. Libertarian environmentalist is an oxymoron.

Since neoliberalism is just libertarianism, neoliberalism also can never support environmentalism. Market-driven environmental policies must be some kind of a cruel joke. They can never work. In strict economically rational terms, it is either never or almost never economically rational to save species, habitats or places. Destruction and extermination is where the money is, and in neoliberal theory, maximum return is the only variable we are allowed to consider.

Libertardarians now argue that humans (I guess maybe those of White European stock) now care enough about environmentalism that we can zero out government, privatize everything, and everything will still be hunky dory for the bighorns, the spotted owls and timber wolves. Yeah right.

In the first place, this would only work with White people, because only Whites can be environmentalists at the moment, and only more advanced Whites in North America and Europe need apply even here. That’s because Whites in Latin America and Russia have proven to be utterly capable of taking care of the environment. Native Americans and Siberians can probably preserve things too, but they don’t run any states.

Let’s test out the libertarian theory on most liberal-minded of the more progressive Whites on Earth, the ultra-liberals in California (though not a White state anymore, nevertheless, California is one of the most pro-environmental states in the nation).

The argument that humans now care enough about species to preserve them is proven wrong here in the West. Even here in ultra-liberal California, the glorious salmon are nearly extinct. The striped bass fishery in the Delta and Bay has also been ruined. The vast herds of Tule Elk that roamed all over the valleys and coastal areas of our state have been decimated and only exist on miniscule preserves that look like petting zoos. Fishers and spotted owls are being driven extinct by the timber industry as we speak.

A lot of CA endangered species are not real celebrities, but salmon would seem to have quite a bit of worth. Yet the salmon fishery in CA and up and down the West has been decimated. And even the ultra-liberal CA senators like Dianne Feinstein insist that we have not creamed the salmon enough, and need to take them out once and for all now. Feinstein’s mostly doing this for one of her rich Jewish buddies, Stewart Resnick of Beverly Hills. So much for liberal US Jews!

The notion that humans (Anywhere!) now value wildlife enough to be trusted with preserving them in a libertarian society is seriously wrong, and we can prove it right here in California.

In the 3rd World, humans are so bestial, venal, animalistic and backwards that they indeed are well on the way to extrerminating everything non-human, non-domesticated and non-utilitarian in sight.

An excellent argument in favor of White superiority (which I agree with) is, as I noted above, that Whites are really the only humans on Earth (who run states) that care about non-human life enough to preserve it.* Virtually every other race and ethnic group of man will gladly exterminate every single non-domesticated species and non-utilitarian species in its land at the drop of a hat.

Preserving species is something only Whites can do. And it’s something that only White governments can do, the White private sector haven proven endlessly to have failed at this endeavor.

*I honestly wish that non-European states were capable of not exterminating everything in sight, but I doubt it. The Middle East is an environmental catastrophe. The only environmentally decent place is Israel, but that’s populated by White people. The only environmentally progressive place in Latin America is Costa Rica, but once again, that’s a White country. It seems that all Arabs and mestizos can do is destroy.

Asians seem like a nightmare in environmental terms. They aren’t even capable of tender feelings towards cats and dogs, which they massacre for sport and food, so how can they possibly be trusted with non-domesticated things. The Japanese have been some of the worst scofflaws in international fishing and their bestial exploits in whaling have earned them the scorn of the planet.

True, in some ways, Koreans and Japanese seem to want to preserve what’s left on their lands, but environmentally, those places are pretty much human-nuked anyway, mostly by overpopulation. A preservationist impulse isn’t worth much if there is nothing left to preserve.

The hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia never had the caretaker mindset of American Indians, instead opting for the more primitive mindset of “kill everything that moves.” The extinction process in SE Asia is very advanced and the state does very little to stop it. Environmental consciousness is extremely low.

Probably Vietnam is one of the more standout states. China is just now starting to develop an environmental ethic, but it doesn’t seem to be very advanced, and in a lot of ways, environmentally, China looks like America 1890.

I’m amazed that anything non-human and non-bovine is still walking around in India, where the extinction process is quite advanced, the state is extremely weak, and poachers are everywhere.

Russians have always been some of the most backwards and barbaric of the Whites, and environmentally, that’s still the case. Since the collapse of the USSR things have really fallen badly apart. Market hunters and poachers stalk the land. In Siberia, the poacher harvest of salmon is the same size as the legal harvest. The Amur Leopard and the Siberian Tiger are hanging on by their bare claws, and I expect them to go extinct soon.

Africa has to be one of the worst places on Earth to be a species of wildlife. Africans are primitive people, and primitives tend to kill anything that moves, usually for food. The only reason that there were still huge wildlife populations 50 years ago is due to White colonists, who forbade the Africans from wiping out the animals. With decolonization, Africans quickly set work slaughtering anything that moved.

That they had not done so in centuries past was due only to the crudity of their weapons. You can’t kill many animals with a spear. In 1965, Africans with firearms were a threat the animal population of the continent. The large megafauna were only saved when the former White colonists were called back in by concerned Africans to save the animals.

Many of the large animal populations still exist, but poachers and bush meat hunters take a devastating toll. I don’t see anything positive in the future. Africans don’t seem to be capable of not exterminating animals.

One argument is that non-Whites do these things because they are poor.

Equatorial Guinea now has a PCI of $21,000/year. Anyone seen any nice environmental initiatives coming out of there? Has the wealth of the Japanese prevented them from killing whales? Has Korean wealth prevented them from waging mass pogroms against dogs and cats? Has the relative wealth of Brazil and Argentina prevented environmental devastation in these places? The Gulf Arab countries are extremely wealthy, but my understanding is that they are environmental wrecks.

So much for the “they do it because they are poor” line.

“The Alpha Male Bites the Dust,” by Alpha Unit

The latest by Alpha Unit, our guest poster, on Alpha Males. As an Alpha herself, she is a bit of an expert on this subject.

Are you an Alpha Male?

There are people who will teach you how to be, if you aren’t – for a price. A lot of them couch this instruction in talk about how to seduce women.

Which brings me to Al Gore.

The concept of the Alpha Male made a splash among media types during the 2000 Presidential campaign, when it was reported that candidate Gore had hired the feminist Naomi Wolf as a “style consultant.”

Ms. Wolf had worked previously for the Clinton campaign, as an adviser on outreach to women voters. Well, she was supposed to be acting in a similar capacity for Gore, but what got translated to the media was that she was coaching him in the ways of the Alpha Male, an allegation Ms. Wolf denies (She says she only used the term once, as a passing reference.).

Yes, the Alpha Male was subjected to a bit of ridicule as a result of all this, but he hasn’t gone anywhere. Go online, and you will see people cashing in, or trying to, with promises of transforming the feckless into alpha males, those dominant guys who get what they want from others – primarily women.

A lot of this thinking about dominance and submission is based on what occurs in the wild, especially in wolf packs, each of which is headed by a dominant, or alpha, male. This is known to be true, right?

Wrong.

So explains Dr. L. David Mech of the University of Minnesota, an expert who has been studying wolves for about forty years.

A wolf pack does not consist of a group of wolves that are subservient to a pack leader assuming the role of an alpha male. At least a natural wolf pack out in the wild does not.

Among his many publications is a paper released in 2000, in which Dr. Mech sets out to explain social dynamics among wolves in the wild. In so doing, he says that most research done on wolves has been done by observing wolves in captivity. And this research has led to some erroneous conclusions about wolf behavior.

“These captive packs,” Dr. Mech states, “were usually composed of an assortment of wolves from various sources placed together and allowed to breed at will.” He goes on to say, “In captive packs, the unacquainted wolves formed dominance hierarchies featuring alpha, beta, omega animals. etc. With such assemblages, these dominance labels were probably appropriate, for most species thrown together in captivity would usually so arrange themselves.”

Dr. Mech’s research for his paper was conducted during the summers of 1986 through 1998 on Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada. He states that in the wild, a wolf pack is nothing but a family, consisting of a breeding pair and their young.

He cites earlier research in which it is hypothesized that one could tell by observing wolf pups which of them had potential as future alpha, or top-ranking, wolves. But he takes issue with this, saying that all young wolves automatically become alphas once they breed.

Dominance contests with other wolves are rare, he says, if they exist at all. “During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack,” he says, “I saw none.”

And his assessment of all the talk about alpha wolves?

Thus calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so “alpha” adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother?

Such a designation emphasizes not the animal’s dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.

He reports that even though male wolves exhibit dominant posturing toward other pack members, a breeding male will defer to the breeding female, exhibiting submissive behavior in his approaches toward her, including giving up food to her.

If there is some type of dominance contest, he says, it is usually concerned with who will allocate food to the pups!

So what of “alpha males” among Homo sapiens sapiens? If a guy is an alpha male, does it mean he naturally resonates an authority that causes others (especially women) to do his bidding, willingly?

Perhaps. But the Alpha Male may find that he is doing the bidding of those he dominates.

Just ask any parent.

References

References Mech, L. David. May 2000. Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs. Minnesotans for Sustainability.