Scotland at least needs the return to the native European Lynx since long time ago. Sheep are what prevents it, but it could help to put some order in the populations of rabbits, vampire deer, roe deer and red foxes.
The European rabbit seems to be in fact two different species. In 2026 it was proposed to split it in Iberian rabbit from West Spain and Portugal, and European rabbit from East Spain and the rest of Europe. Both were isolated in the glaciation in opposite coins of Spain and the split is supported by genetic analysis and Iberian has a darker fur. They had barely interbred since 2 million years ago.
So we know now that moving European rabbits for hunting purposes to Portugal, Malaga or Galicia may be a menace for Iberian Rabbit.
USA has the cotton tail rabbits on genus Sylvilagus that was the original carrier of Myxomathosis virus. They live in swamps and forests.
Rabbit is more "lamb" than "chicken" but none of both. It does not have a strong flavor really. Is a common dish in the Mediterranean and is tasty. Its main problems are the splinter bones that can damage a tooth, and its unappealing look in the butcher shop.
Guinea pig should be similar. More fatty maybe. Very popular in South America, but I never ate those.
There are thousands of millions of people that live with wolves in their houses. And they massively love the experience and claim that it improves their lives. Wolves and dogs are the same species. This means also that wolves are the animal that saved more human lives, by a mile, after humans.
----- but you referred to the wild big bad wolf... Okay
Wolves are shy and don't attack humans if they can avoid it
Registered wolves attacks on people in the last 100 years are not zero. Wolves are the only wild terrestrial animal in the Western countries that would deliberately help, adopt and feed a lost children in distress, so is a negative value and should be expressed as "X people saved by wolves this decade.
Wolves save lives in other ways also. Drivers will see their risk to die in a car crash against a wild boar, a dog or a deer drastically reduced. See "ecology of fear".
And they chase off feral dogs that in fact do attack humans each year.
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Wolves protect cattle and people from disease
Not catching Lyme disease is a good thing
Dutch parents will appreciate also that the cheese and milk that his children consume is free from bovine tuberculosis.
Netherlands is free from the disease but in can reenter at any time. In 2026 four people in the Netherlands suffered the disease.
Farmers fear bovine tuberculosis. One positive means your farm being quarantined and forbidden to sell dairy or meat for an indefinite time. Often having to sacrifice and dump every one of your cows. The air transmission from animal to human is also possible and the disease is not easy to detect in their first stages.
The return of the wolves to Netherlands adds a new layer of protection. They will take good care of assuring that the wildlife does not get the disease.
And before you reply with: "but distemper", rabies is a problem technically solved long time ago in developed countries. Meat baits and an helicopter will grant you that every fox, ferret and wolf in the area will get its vaccine. Poland and Austria do this since 80's with stellar results.
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Wolves benefit hunters
A well documented effect of wolves on the populations of their preys is a drastic improvement in the size and quality of deer trophies by genetic selection when wolves appear. Hunters find desirable having bigger and healthier deer, so wolves provide a valuable service.
"But wolves in my area will ate 150 deer this year!", yep they will do.
Lets imagine that I offer you to choose between two options. I will offer you 10000 dollars, but you can keep the first 150, and then we will trow a dice with a 1% of probability of earning the other 9850 dollars.
Or I will give you "only 9850 dollars" and you'll lose this nice 150 bucks forever.
What option would you choose?
Hunters choose the same. Each time wolves had been extirpated from an area, soon epidemics appeared to decimate the deer population and killing, not hundreds, thousands or tens thousands of deer. It happened in Spain on 2022. It happens all the time.
Also if you think that removing the wolves will stop the attacks to cattle, think again. Is guaranteed, and has been proven several times, that it will increase the attacks.
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Alive wolves may be a touristic resource.
Since 1970 wolf reintroduction, places around Yellowstone started to notice millions of dollars extra each year, because wolves are the only big carnivore in the area that uses the day to frolic in open spaces all around the year (bears sleep for months and cougars are elusive and nocturnal). Tourists love to watch wolves from a safe distance, and travel from far away to see them. Wolves are a touristic magnet.
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Wolves will benefit the huge sector of agriculture and ornamental plants in Holland.
Tulip breeders will have less bulbs unearthed by wild boards. They should be happy about that.
Farmers will have fewer damages in their vegetable or cereal crops, and insurance companies will pay less by those.
Is the damage done on cattle more than the money earned or saved by all the other wolf services?
I doubt it, but farmers can pay anytime they want to remove bovine tuberculosis, screwworms, etc, etc, from each deer and wild boar in the country. If they create the problem by not allowing wolves in the place, maybe they should fix it with their own time and money instead to tax other for that.
I never found a politician that will frown upon the idea of saving taxes in disease cleaning campaigns or forest restoration, because wolves to this for free and those taxes can be used now in other things.
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I assure you that a lot of the people that live with wolves don't have any problem with being safer, richer and healthier
Round faces and opulent bodies were hot stuff in Renoir's times, not so much today. Older people simply had different concepts of feminine beauty than us.
Also those were artists deliberately breaking the rigid rules of realist classicism and finding inspiration on Asian art. Renoir was criticized by its figures "with skin and clothes obscenely stained with what seems dirty greasy oil spots" but the big point was to trigger controversy and to flip the bird to the classicism of the "real" professional artists.
Whaaat? Renoir was born in 1840 and died in 1919. Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s. Have a look at photographs, including artistic nudes, from this era and you will see. Anne Brigman, Alice Boughton, etc., but also any amount of late 19th century art nude and erotica; you will see that Renoir was likely deliberately choosing to paint chubbier, more cherubic, unthreatening nudes, especially after the late 1880s.
But it’s not the shapes of the bodies that I have an issue with, in general. (Apart from the whole cherubic, gravity free aspect.)
It’s the fact that the faces are terrible, featureless, ugly, often scarily unsettling and clownish, the heads are poorly proportioned, the eyes often dead or doll-like.
He painted out the realism of women just as they were demanding equality, IMO. In the real world, women were demanding better pay, better work protection and votes; in Renoir’s world they were often overgrown insipid cherubs, no evidence of angst or really any kind of inner life. His paintings of male faces, largely, are grounded in more realism even into his late era.
> Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s
Not exactly. Women depicted other women as ideal models. Men had a different idea on mind.
There were two types of male painters in that years. Some had enough money to receive a full classical training in Art Academy. Other, like Renoir, came from poverty and blue collar families and had to self-train themselves. They didn't have any access to the elites, and were ignored and mocked by the classically trained ones.
They fought back rebelling against the rigid academy rules, and using shock and scandal so their real experience about the real world couldn't be ignored anymore.
Where Elites embraced paintings of women suggesting opulence (I'm a rich person, I can buy this clothes), mythology (I'm an educated person), elegance or beauty (I'm successful and popular). Blue collared people show proudly their favorite feminine attributes: fecundity and sex.
Renoir could paint a smooth perfect realist face, if he painted a bunch of spots instead, it was a way to declare "I don't want this model to be identified. She received an anonymous face, because is anonymous. Realism and a polished look is not the important thing here". Or maybe he was just drunk and didn't cared. Who knows. Their fellows deliberately rejected the classic glass skins and polished strokes as a way to depict human nature, and founded the modern painting deconstructing the body in all the possible ways on Cubism, Fauvism, Pointillism or Impressionism.
Blue collared painters often painted prostitutes, like a way to shout "this is the real world", "this is what really matters". Some delivered the message in a pretty savage way, even for today standards (See L'Origin Du Monde from Courbet). If you think that all the models were slimmer in 1870, see The Baigneuses also from the same painter.
They proudly show a more free, rebelious underworld (Manet, Dejeuner sur L'Herbe). And many of the big names that came later learned the lesson and became famous selling a fantasy of freedom and underworld to their rich clients.
The real valuable part was not the art (in my opinion). What clients were eager to pay for, was the connections
Dali assured to be filmed always surrounded by beautiful young people. Warhol had their own collection of rare and beautiful animals around to show. Bacon and Hockney played the same role creating safe spaces or became models for Transvestite or LGTB people.
This is the lesson to all future artists. Stick a banana to a wall, it does not matter. Is just an excuse to people came and laugh. What matters is the value of your social net. What you can do to entertain your rich clients, to help them to launder their money, to connect them with famous people, drug dealers, or "trustable" sexual workers.
But this is just my personal opinion, and is fine if other differ.
> But, but... women demanding equality!
This was never about women demanding equality. Art was a war of classes
I would strongly advice to just pay a few bucks to somebody with experience for a quick consulting job in place.
Garden design is painting with life beings, substrate, and time. (With a paint that has its own ideas about remaining where you put it or doing what is expected).
Is basically an art; and AI is a really bad choice for doing art (unless you want to be chained to the safest, blandest, more average trophy garden possible. The same boring garden that everybody has).
A wrong garden design may make your next thirty years pretty miserable and even cost a lot of money trying to fix the mistakes. A wrong design can help to burn down your house.
As a bonus befriending a real plant lover and collector, if you can find a real one, can be also a treasure of rare green gifts. The problem is finding one of those elusive garden gnomes because there are plenty of pretenders and sellers, and just a few real wizards.
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