Anyone driving at night along the highways and rural roads in Mississippi, especially during the fall and winter, knows that you had better be scanning the roadsides for signs of movement.
That’s because somewhere along that journey, there could be deer in close proximity about to wander in front of your fast-moving vehicle, threatening not just the automobile but the lives of the occupants inside it.
There may, though, be a natural way to reduce this risk: Add some wolves into the mix.
That’s what a study in Wisconsin suggests, according to a recent article in The Atlantic.
Although Mississippi thinks it has it bad with deer-vehicle collisions, Wisconsin has it five times worse with 20,000 reported collisions a year. A trio of college researchers who specialize in environmental economics say the numbers would be even higher if not for Wisconsin’s wolf population.
They analyzed 22 years of data, comparing Wisconsin counties with wolf populations to those without. They calculated, somewhat guardedly, that wolves have reduced deer-vehicle crashes by a fourth in that state, saving nearly $11 million a year — some 63 times more than what was paid out in compensation for the loss of livestock and pets that the wolves caused.
How do wolves reduce deer-vehicle collisions? They kill some of the deer, but they scare many more of them away, causing the deer to stay deeper in the woods and farther away from civilization and passing automobiles.
Apparently wolves also are smarter about keeping their distance from roadways. According to The Atlantic article, during a recent 12-month period, there were only 21 reported cases of collisions in Wisconsin between a vehicle and a wolf. Not only are such encounters rare, but they’re a lot less dangerous, at least to humans, than running into a 300-pound buck.
Skeptics of the study say its conclusions require more validation. The authors also acknowledge their economic analysis could be off, since they didn’t take into account some direct and indirect costs created by a large wolf population, including “the sadness of seeing your animals killed, the effects on livestock productivity because animals are stressed, and the money farmers spend on protecting their animals,” as one of the researchers put it.
Plus there’s always the risk of unintended consequences, when a remedy ends up creating a bigger headache than the problem it was intended to solve. Kudzu reminds us of that.
Still, the prospect of using wolves to cut down on vehicle collisions with deer is intriguing. If it worked, it could be beneficial not only to human beings. It could also help out the deer, which stand a better chance of surviving a run-in with a wolf than with a car.
