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Los Angeles Times
23-07-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
We know how to coexist with bears and wolves. Will we kill them instead?
Humans have always had an emotional relationship with predators. We both revere and demonize them. We buy more than 100 million teddy bears annually for our children, while 50,000 real bears are hunted yearly in North America. Cultural fables and fairy tales simultaneously vilify and celebrate predators — from 'The Lion King' to the Three Bears to the Big Bad Wolf. In elementary school, we teach kids about the food chain and how every animal is crucial in maintaining a balanced ecosystem. Predators are often the entry point to understanding ecology for young minds, with an abundance of nature films about sharks, bald eagles, tigers and many more fascinating predators. Somewhere between elementary school and adulthood, we forget what predators teach us and how much we need them. And it is this nation's adults who need to reconcile their ideas about predators and decide if we truly want to live with the ones we once attempted to exterminate. Our capacity to erase predators is proven. Our ability to conserve and recover them is equally established. The fundamental question remains: Do we wish to live alongside them? This age-old conflict resurfaced in California recently, igniting modern tensions. This spring, the Los Angeles Times wrote several articles on predator tensions, including a suspected black bear attack in Sierra County, conflict between farmers and a handful of wolves, and ranchers pressuring legislators for permission to 'remove' wolves. Ranchers spotlighted these sparse examples by with an ominous, documentary-style video online likening the severity of the issue to investigative crime reporting. This reporting paints a picture of an intensifying war between predators and those who would hunt them, if not for California law. The reality is that these examples of predators affecting humans are extremely rare. However, these stories build up and fuel a societal bias known in psychology as the availability heuristic, whereby a person uses a mental shortcut to judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. When our judgment is clouded in this way, we design wildlife policy driven by fear, not reason. Images of a calf mauled by a wolf are evocative and ignite emotional responses. The same is true of an image of a wolf caught in a snare trap slowly suffering as it struggles to free itself. The conflict among wolves, prey and people is real. The question is how to manage it responsibly. First, we need clarity on the actual harm done by predators, including wolves. Wolves do attack livestock, but statistically the risk of an individual cow being attacked by a wolf is less than 1 in 100,000 in any given year. In more than 125 years across North America, wolves have only ever killed two people. In contrast, Americans kill each other at an annual rate of 6.8 per 100,000 individuals. It is clearly safer to be cattle with wolves roaming about than it is to be a person in society. This is not to say a wolf mauling a calf is not a tragic loss for an individual rancher, but we need to reckon these sparse personal losses with the drastic ecological damage of hunting wolves to near extinction. Today, there are approximately 6,000 to 8,000 gray wolves remaining in the contiguous U.S. (down from approximately 2 million). Wolves are known as 'ecosystem guardians' or 'keystone species,' meaning they are critical to maintaining ecosystem balance. When they are systematically removed, we see increases in livestock diseases, land degradation and food chain destabilization. Given the rarity of actual wolf attacks, we must invest in solutions that protect both ranchers and predators. An example is Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers' proposal to include $3.7 million in the state budget for wolf monitoring and abatement projects. These nonlethal methods are the most effective way to ensure predators and humans coexist. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, nonlethal methods reduce wolf-livestock conflicts by an average of 91%. Yet in 2023, USDA's Wildlife Services devoted less than 1% of its $286-million budget to nonlethal efforts. Despite nearly equal preference among livestock producers for both approaches, the money overwhelmingly supports lethal control. It is possible to create a future in which wolves, cattle and ranchers coexist with minimal harm. However, it is not possible to imagine a world in which one side 'wins' outright without severe negative consequences. We have the resources to find a win for ranchers and a win for wolves — if the American people choose to do so. Peter Kareiva, a former chief executive of the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and a former director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is a founding member of Team Wolf, an organization focused on the long-term protection and recovery of gray wolves.
Indian Express
22-06-2025
- Indian Express
Florida man breaks into stranger's to avoid angry wife, cooks and bathes— faces burglary charge
Deputies in Florida's Davenport, Polk County responded to a call on June 9, when a neighbour noticed lights unexpectedly on in a rental property. When officers arrived, they discovered Jocelyn Charles, 44, inside the home. According to the arrest affidavit reviewed by The Independent, Charles was found cooking and had just drawn a bath. Charles allegedly told deputies that he had been using the home's water and electricity without permission. He reportedly stayed at the residence for four days to avoid a fight with his wife. Now, he is facing charges of unarmed burglary and petit theft. According to the arrest affidavit, police said that when they entered the residence, the stove was on, the lights were going, and a cellphone was plugged into a wall outlet. 'It's one of those things where you just have to grin and bear it,' the Polk County Sheriff's Office said, as per The Independent. On June 15, the Sheriff's Office announced the arrest in a Facebook post filled with references to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The post featured bear puns, jokes about bath temperature, and a hashtag: #IfJoeIsConvictedHeWillSpendTimeBehindTheGuiltyLocksAndTheThreeBars. 'We assume the bath temperature was not too hot, nor too cold, but juuuuust right,' the post added. Despite the humour, the post also made it clear Charles allegedly admitted to breaking in. Along with the official charges, he is being held on a $10,000 bond for burglary and $250 bond for theft. Authorities confirmed he has no prior theft arrests. Charles remains in custody as the case proceeds. (With inputs from The Independent)
Miami Herald
17-06-2025
- Miami Herald
Man avoiding angry wife breaks into random home for dinner and bath, FL cops say
A man desperate to avoid his angry wife made matters worse when he sneaked into a random home for dinner and a bath, according to investigators in Florida. The intrusion happened June 9 in Davenport and resulted in the man being charged with burglary, according to a June 15 Polk County Sheriff's Office news release. Investigators likened it to the 'Polk County version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' 'The homeowner wasn't going to be around for a while, so he asked his neighbor to bear the responsibility of watching over the house. That neighbor did a fantastic job too,' the sheriff's office wrote on Facebook. 'One night, the neighbor saw lights going on and off within the house, so he called the homeowner, who in turn contacted the PCSO. ... Deputies went to the residence and found (a man) inside, cooking, and he had just finished filling the tub for a bath. We assume the bath temperature was not too hot, nor too cold, but juuuuust right.' When questioned, the 44-year-old man conceded 'not only did he not have permission to be there, he also had no idea who owned the house,' the sheriff's office said. '(He) told deputies that he had gotten in a fight with his wife, and he didn't want to go home, so he chose to (enter) someone else's home instead,' the sheriff's office said. The man, who had no criminal history, reported he had been staying at the home four days, officials said. He was charged with felony unarmed burglary, misdemeanor petit theft, first offense, and domestic battery, jail records show. Details of what led the man to that particular home were not released. Davenport is about a 45-mile drive southwest from downtown Orlando.
Bloomberg
22-05-2025
- Automotive
- Bloomberg
Surge Pricing and Midnight Discounts: EV Charging Rates Go Dynamic
When Jeffrey Raun drives his Tesla Model 3 far from his Anchorage home he pays some of the highest public charging rates in the nation. Juicing the car's battery from 10% to 90% full costs somewhere around $32 at the Three Bears grocery and sporting goods outpost in Chugiak, roughly triple what he pays at home. 'This is a choice we've made and we're all in and we're going to charge where and when we need to charge,' Raun explained. 'I firmly believe I'm still money ahead in the use of my EV.'
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Yahoo
NBC 4 reporter has a 'Goldilocks' moment after finding naked man in his bed
The break-in felt like something out of "Goldilocks and Three Bears," at least that's how Michael Duarte tells it. Duarte, an NBC 4 sports writer, told his news station that he had been away from home for a few days and returned this past Saturday to find someone had broken into his Echo Park home. Duarte said he could see through a glass door in the back of his home that the kitchen had been ransacked. At first, he thought a wild animal had made its way inside and damaged things, but a broken glass panel next to the doorknob indicated a break-in. 'I thought someone had broken into my home, robbed me and left,' he told the station. Duarte could not immediately be reached by phone at the news station or through his Instagram account. When Duarte made his way to the front door, he told the station that he noticed another glass panel had been broken and in the distance he noticed something peculiar. It wasn't a bear, just a naked man, sleeping on his bed. 'To see a man not just sleeping in my bed, but completely naked sleeping in my bed … I was shocked,' he said. 'Like Goldilocks from the Three Bears, and someone's sleeping in my bed instead of the little bear.' Read more: Naked man arrested after walking around Disneyland's New Orleans Square Duarte told a friend waiting in a car with his pets to call police, who arrived to arrest the man. As the man was being led away in handcuffs, he threatened to kill him and his friend, according to Duarte. A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately respond to the Times inquiry on the arrest. Shortly after the intruder's arrest, Duarte began to survey the damage in his home. He said the man appeared to have been in his home for many hours, helping himself to food in his fridge. 'He ate a box of ice cream sandwiches, he ate Dole whip, a whole box of Beyond Beef burgers he stuffed in the microwave and cooked them,' Duarte said. The man also found Duarte's stash of chewing gum. 'I had a fresh pack with 60 inside, unopened,' he told NBC. 'He opened it up, chewed all of them and then spit a big wad of gum about … the size of a softball.' On the back patio, he said the man used a statue to kill a possum and found bags containing what he suspects were drugs. The odd break-in underscores the recent jump in property break-ins in the area patrolled by LAPD's Rampart Station, according to LAPD's latest crime statistics. From March 16 to May 10, there was a jump in burglaries and break-ins from 23 incidents to 33, a 43% rise. Despite the increase, property crimes remained at 114 incidents compared to last year when there were 217 reported cases. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
