A single blue crab eats 500 clams a day. A single specimen of blue crab breaks all nets in a fisherman's tackle. And he is moving to other areas of the Mediterranean coast: the last time he was seen he was eating prawns in Sanlúcar. How are they going to solve it? I don't know either, but I can translate it into another language: at the reproductive rate of the wolf we will soon see a blue wolves eating an apple dog on the Gran Vía.
Prediction number 3.- «Man will suffer if he mistreats animals». All living beings must have their space, because they all have their importance; everyone has it, even a cat. In medieval Europe, the white man's religion took sides against the black cat, as a symbol of bad omen, accusing him of being the reincarnation of witches. They did not hesitate to exterminate all black cats... and a large part of the painted cats too, just in case. Total, since cats are not eaten, they are useless. What a human faux pas.
In a few campaigns, in the absence of cats, black rats invaded all corners of the cities and with them they brought lice and with them they brought a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, although then no one knew what a bacterium was. The Black Death devastated the continent and for 400 years the cause of so much mortality was a mystery. The human believed that it was a work of God to punish his sins. Pope Clement VI composed a prayer to that effect and ordered all his churches to pray against the plague. Another blunder of the man. Thousands of Christians gathered in masses and processions to fight the plague by praying, infecting each other by sharing lice and bacteria. For fear of death, the cities were evicted and the people marched to the towns, taking the plague with them and infecting the rest of the population.
Globalization already existed then, it is not a new thing. Although the data is not precise, at least between 80 and 100 million Europeans died, almost half of the population, due to the phobia of black cats. Incredible true? Tremendous, but it is that every time we take sides for or against an animal we spoil everything. Will favoring the wolf have consequences this time? Definitely.
Prediction number 4.- «We will hit bottom for not listening to those who know». In Mao's China, the dissidents were eliminated and among them were thousands of capable farmers and ranchers, who didn't know about other things, but knew about their own for a while; and no one wanted to listen to them. The communist macro-exploitations were directed by technicians and experts well educated on paper, but little experienced on the ground.
To protect the huge chicken farms they built, they decided to exterminate all the birds of prey that caused them enormous losses. The trophic cascade was unleashed. In the absence of predators, the chickens did not suffer casualties but the sparrows multiplied by millions and since each one ate 4 kilos of grain per year, the losses were even greater than before. The sparrows had to be exterminated. The government rewarded each farmer for each kilo of sparrows killed, and there were trucks that passed through the towns collecting the billions of sparrow carcasses that resulted from such an undertaking.
The plan worked, and the plague of sparrows ended... giving way to a much larger plague of insects that the happy extinct bird fed on. The insect plague devastated the crops and the ensuing famine wiped out more than 25 million Chinese. 25 million people, overwhelming. Birds of prey had to be reintroduced and their numbers controlled to stop the trophic cascade and thus overcome the problem. Will they listen here to the rancher, the veterinarian, the scientist, the hunter or the farmer? Do not expect such a thing.
Prediction number 5.- «There will be a first time for everything». I grew up in the 80s, mesmerized on Tuesdays after dinner with the tune of El hombre y la tierra, with my mouth open admiring Félix when he played with Sibila and Remo. I still keep the field notebook (photo attached) where I drew wolves playing "Martin Rodríguez de la Fuente" when I was in the 5th year of EGB. Later I studied in Oviedo and Madrid, I was able to work in Madrid and Oviedo, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to live in my town. I like towns, I like their people, and I like the natural environment that surrounds them. I like raising my kids here and getting to know all kinds of bugs and plants, but from that to having them surrounded by wolves, there's a big difference. Will they attack people? I do not know too. I want to think that no, they have never done it, although there is a first time for everything. And I want to think that people are ahead of animals, otherwise we are doing something wrong as a society. We always wait for something to happen to take action, but here it is already happening and they are not taken.
Prediction number 6.- «Man will be a wolf for man», as Hobbes proclaimed. Lobos de Pantalón, alluding to the theme of Mr. Mercado, will form a "fictional tribe with jester syndrome." Dr. Rodríguez de la Fuente, with his eloquence and his Burgos accent, would describe it as follows: «The Pantalon Wolf is a subspecies of Homo Urbanita that lives in a semi-wild state surrounded by asphalt and legislates, dictates and agrees from a leather armchair; devises laws, decrees and alliances so that everything goes better. Sometimes he succeeds and other times not so much. But the Trouser Wolf survives at the top of the food chain because it dominates, overwhelms, deceives, speculates and requisitions with petty impunity. He overwhelms his peers until they almost suffocate them, to take refuge at the end of the exhausting work day in his luxurious lair in a wealthy neighborhood of Madrid ».
Every rule that the Trouser Wolf invents will harm Homo Ruralis until the trophic cascade extinguishes it. Each cattle ranch that closes in a town will be replaced by an office in the city; each mechanic who closes his workshop will give rise to an official in a council; each one who leaves will never return. The Pantalon Wolf will create an Animal Welfare Law so that lambs and calves grow up with all the guarantees of livestock health; it will also create a Child Protection Law so that no boy or girl suffers physical or emotional harm; and will create a Law for the Protection of the Wolf to prevent its extinction and promote its reintroduction throughout the national territory. How will the Trouser Wolf enforce the three laws with the canid living among farms with cattle and houses with children? I don't know, but in Villar the three laws are overlapping bordering on the irrational.
Each law contains a message to society; with the wolf they tell us to leave town, to make room for the wolf, to go to a flat in the city and to look for work in some polygon. I don't like the idea, I'm against it. And it is not about seeing if the countryside or the city is better, it is about valuing the best of each one and then each one who chooses to live where they like best.
Prediction number 7.- «Sheep with tusks will dominate vermin». We are all animalists, ecologists and naturalists, to a greater or lesser extent. I think we all like to preserve the environment, but radicalism is not good, no matter in which field it occurs. The defense of animals in the wild and the care of domestic animals should be engraved in our DNA, but the extreme of putting animals before people borders on pathological. Everything must have a limit. People must also be protected against invasions of animals.
There are professionals who work very hard in favor of animal life who deserve all the recognition. They control epidemics, prevent plagues, protect humans from zoonoses, prevent extinctions, control customs, etc... They have my support because they love animals and take care of people. But at the other extreme there are also other carpet specimens who label themselves as animalists (every day with a new term) who are selective defenders of animals. They are defenders of the wolf, but not of the sheep. They are sorry that a hunter kills a roe deer but they protest if one of them leaves their car wrecked. They like the wild boar... until it comes in to destroy the garden of their chalet in Oviedo or Gijón. So they don't like them anymore, and they hire archers to exterminate them. Does the wolf have a better right to life, for example, than the mule that my neighbor Suso had? It seems that yes, according to them.
This type of animalists, hereinafter Animalists, would be the food of Rodríguez de la Fuente's words, I'm sure. «The Animalists are examples of lively fauna, dominated by tendencies dictated by a mobile terminal that permanently cuffs their hands and tames them to the rhythm of some tone or vibration. They hide between social networks and offices, they act out of vicious interest and perverted convenience, moved in herd by colors and acronyms, feeding on public salaries and subsidies, and they show great ability to camouflage themselves in influential positions from where they make arbitrary decisions about animals. They are parasites, the ticks of the country. They preach from their digital pulpit and the message penetrates the sect. They don't respect the environment more than me or anyone else, and they love the stall more than the animals, that's for sure. How do they do that? I don't know, my crystal ball is not enough, but it tells me that the wolf has come this far without them and that when they are gone, there will still be a wolf. Until then they will suck from the teat as much as they can.
Prediction number 8.- «Nothing will ever be the same again»; because we don't learn Other countries have protected the wolf to the extreme and have suffered its consequences. But they have learned that nature regulates itself if humans don't put their paws in. For example, in the Yellowstone National Park (USA) in the 1930s, the wolf was exterminated because it ate Bambi, the fawn from the Disney movie. The social alarm was so great that to protect the elk, so beautiful and defenseless, they removed the wolf from the park. But every intervention has a cascading effect.
After 70 years without a wolf, elk overpopulation was such that it was leaving Yellowstone treeless. The old trees were dying and the new shoots that were being born were gobbled up by the 30,000 bambis that overpopulated the reserve. Without roots to fix the soil, the erosion of the rains dragged sediment into the rivers, which gradually ran out of fish due to the mud; fish that were food for a lot of mammals and birds, which also disappeared. The man's hand was at it again. The damage was done, the park was about to collapse. What saved the park? It was saved when they left it as it was at the beginning.
Among these birds that died in Yellowstone was the bald eagle, the country's national emblem; and that there is untouchable. To save the life of the patriotic symbol, at the end of the 90s they reintroduced a few wolves and she-wolves from Canada. When they found such an amount of food and no predator that affected them, they multiplied year after year without limit, as the authorities considered it appropriate. "Don't even touch the wolf," the Americans used to say (as we Spaniards say now). The wolf gobbled up the elk and reached such an overpopulation that due to the lack of food it had to end up also eating the raccoons, beavers and rats; These species are food for the puma, the coyote and the fox, which, when they saw themselves without food, decimated their population until they almost disappeared. The wolf contracted the diseases from the rodents it ate and suffered such an epidemic that once again brought it to the brink of extinction in the park.
The system has evened out over 25 years at numbers ranging from 11-12 wolf packs for all of Yellowstone. When they drop below 10, the number of elk runs wild and the trees dwindle, but the wolf immediately thrives because it has more food; when they go over 13 there are too many wolves and they get sick and die until the system is regulated. Nature has found the balance by itself and has the biodiversity that corresponds to it: the trees have returned, the rivers of clean water, the bald eagle, the pumas, etc... When will we cut the trophic cascade of the wolf here? I suppose we will act when the wolf attacks the black-legged Iberian pig and the fighting bull, emblems of this country (like the bald eagle for the Yankees, come on).
One fact: nature has taken 25 years to achieve balance there. If we wait 25 years in Asturias, nothing will need to be done anymore because there will be no one left in the towns. Another piece of information: Yellowstone has almost the same area as Asturias, there they have a balanced ecosystem with 12 herds and here we have 38 registered in the census dated 2020. Today there will be many more and they continue to increase. And another piece of information: nobody lives in Yellowstone and a million Asturians live here. A little common sense, please.
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But that doesn't seem to matter, it seems that the human being is not affected by what happens in the ecosystem that surrounds him. Can humanity suffer a pandemic like the Yellowstone wolf? That will never happen. For that, there would have to be a remote country in the world with such an overpopulation that the inhabitants are forced to eat bats (for example), that these bats infect man with some unknown respiratory virus (for example) and that infect others. the entire population of the planet causing millions of deaths. Impossible, that will never happen.
Prediction number 9.- «The rural world will disappear». If Félix addressed this problem, in his program he would describe us like this: «Homo Ruralis lives in the countryside, wears a checkered shirt and travels by tractor. You are tired of fighting for your livelihood working 12 hour days, 365 days a year, tired of adjusting to phantom milk quotas, tired of milking mad cows that ruin you, tired of blue tongues plaguing your cabin, tired of production margins tiny and tired of reinvesting everything he earns in a family business without generational relief ».
Apart from all the historical drawbacks to get ahead, we now add wolves in between. They eat all small and medium cattle that are left unguarded at night, as well as pets and draft and riding animals. What's more, if the farmer wants to preserve them, he must build new stables and electrified fences that he will pay out of pocket. And if you still suffer the loss of an animal, you must provide reliable evidence that the death was caused by the wolf, because it will be taken as a fraud until the contrary is proven (that there is also an episode, we will not deny it). In the best of cases, he will collect the damages a year and a half later, by which time his animal would rent 5 times more than what they are going to pay him, but he accepts the "alms" and continues pulling ahead, like all his life.
In Asturias, the livestock sector moves a direct business volume of 220 million euros, between milk and meat. There are too many rooms to not take it into account. This gives life directly to feed stores, veterinary clinics, slaughterhouses, agricultural cooperatives, mechanical workshops, diesel distributors, hardware stores, stable builders, agglomerate and concrete plants, sawmills, etc... which are the support of many workers who with They spend their salaries in supermarkets, bars, restaurants, shoe stores, dentists, physiotherapy clinics, furniture stores, hairdressers, agencies, insurance offices, etc... It is a true socio-economic ecosystem. Do you know someone who works in these sectors? Sure you do, it may even affect you directly what I expose here. If we let the people die, we will be facing a trophic cascade that will affect the rest of the sectors. And if so many businesses disappear, who will pay taxes to sustain all this racket? Rita the Porter.
The rural world remains uninhabited, disappears, and with it all kinds of memories, traditions, folklore, etc… and the rural way of life will disappear. Don't come to me later filling your mouths with demagogy and talking about the Empty Spain. The time to act is now. The population of western Asturias is decreasing, aging, and those who resist going to a big city will concentrate on the coastal strip attracted by the industry of Navia and the services of Ribadeo. I'm not saying anything new, and I know it's not just the wolf's fault, but it's another nail in the coffin for the rural world. It's been going on for a long time, we don't want to see it, but raise your hand if you haven't ever heard that "Tapia remains dead after summer", or that of "in Castropol tá todo pechao", or that of "na Caridá there is nothing». And if Tapia, Castropol and El Franco are like this, the councils in the interior are much worse off; see, for example, Pesoz, with the loss of 93% of its population since 1950. We are the oldest community in Spain and, furthermore, youth do not live in the town: they go to study and work where they have better conditions, and never again returns, with which the birth rate is practically nil in inland Asturias. In a few years we will have a paradise here, the natural paradise that we advertise so much... but desert.
Prediction number 10.- «Decay will reign over the land». Don't expect to find open bars in our towns, no working gas stations, no clean recreational areas, and no passable hiking trails. Do not expect to find accessible beaches, doctors in peripheral offices or beds in regional hospitals because without population these services will not be maintained. Do not expect to get a position by competitive examination as a child teacher in a rural school because there will be no children and therefore there will be no school; Don't even expect to travel in ALSA because they won't put a bus for you alone (don't even ask for the train); Do not expect to find the tourist offices open, or the Post Office, or libraries, or nurseries or anything similar because there will not even be town halls in inland Asturias. The empty councils will merge with each other due to the lack of resources and personnel to sustain themselves. Achieve the official status of the Asturian? Hurry up because soon there will be no one left to speak it. Jarrio are we all? More of the same. Without population there are no votes, without votes there is no force. So much you vote, so much you are worth. There are a thousand examples...
Prediction number 11.- «We will eat shit... and the worst thing is that we will like it». I heard this phrase from a 92-year-old Frenchman a long time ago. At that time of my adolescence I did not understand the sentence, but now with the passing of the years I am seeing the form.
Today, communities that do not directly suffer from it vote in favor of the wolf, but its effect will also come as a result of the trophic cascade applied to humans. As the Pantalon Wolf closes farms and towns, there will be fewer meat and milk producers and more demand for their derivatives in the cities. Homo Urbanita will one day find himself pushing his shopping cart through a modern city supermarket and will have to walk past the shelves of Manchego cheese, Castilian lamb and Asturian beef, to name a few. "What prices!", he will think while looking askance. When you go through the cash register, you will carry slices, nuggets and sausages in your cart because you can't afford the rest... and the worst thing is that you will like what you buy. What's wrong with that? Nothing, more would be missing.
Besides, he won't even realize why that's happening to him; And if one day he realizes it will be too late: the Homo Ruralis puppies will have gone to live in the city and they will have taken away from the Homo Urbanita pup the promotion in the company where he works, the position of the opposition that he was preparing or a tender of the work he hoped to contract. He won't understand why, as he is a painter, for example, there is a van belonging to a painter from Trevías painting his building in Valentín Masip, having him there. The town painter will ask, "What the hell is this guy doing here taking my job?" "Look for life", I will answer.
The trophic cascade that started in the town will wreak havoc in the city, and simply because both are equally intelligent but Homo Ruralis works and makes more effort. The one will prosper because all his life he has been squeezed and he has had difficulties that have forged him like this; the other will live comfortably at the expense of the family clan as long as he can, will receive unemployment and all kinds of aid, and will protest bitterly because the system does not give him enough opportunities. Look around you and you will find examples of what I say.
Prediction number 12.- «Everything will get better by itself». The bad thing is that if we take 25 years, like in Yellowstone, the rural world will already have disappeared by then, so nothing will need to be done. The school bus will not have to give way to the wolf because it will no longer have students to pick up, nor will my children be in danger because they will have left here, nor will my neighbor fear for her dog because she will not replace it fearing she will also lose the substitute.
In 25 years everything will balance itself, the wolf will be in its place and in its number, and nature itself will do it if we let it. Everything will get better on its own, but in my opinion it would be necessary to intervene before to avoid greater evils later. The economic and social consequences will be too many. In my opinion, the number of litters and their geographical location should be controlled because the overpopulation of the wolf and the mixture with the human is nonsense for both one and the other:
The wolf loses its instinct, tames itself, approaches houses and roads, becomes a scavenger, eats dead calves on farms, and prowls among containers in search of leftovers. It is no longer the purifier of the rest of the species, the one that balances the system, the one that controls the natural environment. It ceases to be the majestic Canis Lupus that Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente introduced us, it ceases to be a "beautiful, slender, imposing animal, the apex of the ecological pyramid", and becomes a second-rate wolf, an outcast, a predator denatured. He no longer runs to hunt, he eats locked sheep and chained dogs; easy food. He does not dare to enter a full-grown wild boar, and running after a roe deer tires him. Here you hear comments that say that they are wolves bred in captivity and that they are released later to repopulate; It is said that they feed them at certain points and that is why they are used to human contact. I have no proof of this, but if it is true it seems to me nonsense; yet another example of external intervention on the environment gone wrong.
The pack hierarchy expels these less pure individuals from the mountainous regions where the true king of the forest lives, his selected brother. The wolf that lives in the Sierra de la Bobia, for example, is authentic, it hunts daily and eats hot food every day; It is a beast that lives apart from man. The one that reaches the coast, on the other hand, is a tamed, fattened, distorted animal, accustomed to people and cars. It has lost its essence, in short. To remain a wolf, the wolf must live in its environment, not ours.
The human also loses in this game; he loses his freedom: in my town the elderly no longer go for a walk, the children do not play outside the house after certain hours, the pets are picked up early and those who have cattle have to put them away before nightfall. The work will increase and they will sleep with the uncertainty of knowing if the next day they will have all their animals alive. "And you, meanwhile, assuming, searching, denying your time", as Rosendo said.
Building stables for the cattle, installing special fences for the wolf, clearing farms that were previously cleaned by goats and sheep, keeping mastiffs to watch and fatten animals that could graze without any expense, etc... supposes an outlay of thousands and thousands Euros at our expense. Add to that living with fear and worry, I don't know how much you pay. And, in addition to all this that is spent in the town, how does the joke of the wolf plan come out to each taxpayer? Better not ask, you do not want to know.
I know I just told an exaggerated, apocalyptic, decadent movie. True, but based on real events. That is why I hope that I am very wrong and that I will be here in 2050 to admit it, of which I will be very happy. I hope I'm wrong a lot! And forgive the informal tone that this article takes on at times even when dealing with such a serious topic, but if you didn't embellish it a bit by now you would have given up reading it a long time ago as depressing.
That 92-year-old Franconian I mentioned before also told me that what made him most sad about the life he had to live was leaving the world worse than it was when he arrived. That same idea has also been on my mind for a long time, at least as far as the rural world is concerned. Why am I writing this? For me and for all my companions.
While a few give us for mules due to their ideas, fashions or various interests, the rest of us fight for our children, our livelihood, our way of life. I am in favor of protecting and conserving nature, but if you want to turn our land into a natural park, don't forget that there are people inside.
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