If some of them were simply allowed to roam free on some of the no longer needed land used for grazing they would live and recover for the most part. Animals, even domesticated ones, still have the insticts to survive and while they would struggle at first, each generation would filter out the negative traits of domestication until a healthy population is left.
Yes, this is even true for livestock. A few aggressive bulls being around the herd instead of separated will be a defense against a lot of predators, just like in wild cattle herds.
I don’t know how many factory-farmed animals can even live without human intervention. Sadly, they’ve been so selectively bred I’m not sure that living in the wild is an option anymore.
Pigs thrive when they get loose. Feral horses have successfully started breeding populations multiple times. Chickens frequently roam free on non-factory farms and just stick around for the easy food, but can find more on their own.
No, cows are far too domesticated to have a decent go of it in the wild. They depend on things like antibiotics and vitamins and constant vet maintenance to survive. They’d be pretty fucked in short order and until then they’d wreak havoc on native ecology.
They really don’t as a total population though, that is more about keeping them healthy while they are forced to grow faster than they did before farming. They only need vitamins when they are force fed grain that bulks them out with few nutrients.
It would require thousands for a diverse enough genetic population and maybe some protection from poachers, but even beef and dairy cattle could be as successful as the Yellowstone bison. There just needs to be enough for them to reproduce enough to overcome the initially high rate of death.
Fair points all around in your first paragraph. But the question remains… Why would we want to maintain a herd of large, non-native, probably ecologically destructive, post-domesticated animals in the wild? Seems like a very poor choice, and a treatment we’ve repeatedly failed to extend to most native species.
We wouldn’t necessarily want to release all of the domesticated animals, but we have lost a lot of native ecology and some of them could fill those missing niches. Like cattle could replace bison if we didn’t expand the bison herds, because large grazers is a niche and we already destroyed that niche in North America. We wouldn’t need to release turkeys since we still have wild turkeys. Chickens and pigs could probably go away too, since I’m pretty sure both are invasive.
But the mindset of them all just dying out in the wild is important to dispel, both because it is a bad justification to wipe them out by itself and a dangerous assumption for people that might want to keep some around as pets, not realizing they have a high chance of surviving if they run wild.
If some of them were simply allowed to roam free on some of the no longer needed land used for grazing they would live and recover for the most part. Animals, even domesticated ones, still have the insticts to survive and while they would struggle at first, each generation would filter out the negative traits of domestication until a healthy population is left.
Yes, this is even true for livestock. A few aggressive bulls being around the herd instead of separated will be a defense against a lot of predators, just like in wild cattle herds.
I don’t know how many factory-farmed animals can even live without human intervention. Sadly, they’ve been so selectively bred I’m not sure that living in the wild is an option anymore.
Pigs thrive when they get loose. Feral horses have successfully started breeding populations multiple times. Chickens frequently roam free on non-factory farms and just stick around for the easy food, but can find more on their own.
No, cows are far too domesticated to have a decent go of it in the wild. They depend on things like antibiotics and vitamins and constant vet maintenance to survive. They’d be pretty fucked in short order and until then they’d wreak havoc on native ecology.
They really don’t as a total population though, that is more about keeping them healthy while they are forced to grow faster than they did before farming. They only need vitamins when they are force fed grain that bulks them out with few nutrients.
It would require thousands for a diverse enough genetic population and maybe some protection from poachers, but even beef and dairy cattle could be as successful as the Yellowstone bison. There just needs to be enough for them to reproduce enough to overcome the initially high rate of death.
Fair points all around in your first paragraph. But the question remains… Why would we want to maintain a herd of large, non-native, probably ecologically destructive, post-domesticated animals in the wild? Seems like a very poor choice, and a treatment we’ve repeatedly failed to extend to most native species.
We wouldn’t necessarily want to release all of the domesticated animals, but we have lost a lot of native ecology and some of them could fill those missing niches. Like cattle could replace bison if we didn’t expand the bison herds, because large grazers is a niche and we already destroyed that niche in North America. We wouldn’t need to release turkeys since we still have wild turkeys. Chickens and pigs could probably go away too, since I’m pretty sure both are invasive.
But the mindset of them all just dying out in the wild is important to dispel, both because it is a bad justification to wipe them out by itself and a dangerous assumption for people that might want to keep some around as pets, not realizing they have a high chance of surviving if they run wild.