Habituation of wildlife, deliberate or accidental, can be a useful tool in research, a profitable tourist attraction, a serious nuisance, and even a mortal danger. It is the first stage of an animal gaining familiarity with humans and is always a state of unconsummated interest by the animal in us. The next stage following habituation, taming, is always initiated by a habituated animal, which thereby continues gaining information about us. In some carnivores this may be an attack to test for edibility. Even tame animals may continue to explore humans by addressing us in their species-specific sign language as if we were social companions of their own species. In my work with free-living but tame bighorn sheep, females began to treat me as a super-female, while males addressed me with dominance displays and attacked me. Since the sign language of different species of mammals may be unintelligible to us, it has led to “unpredictable” fatal attacks in zoological gardens and national parks. In reality, species that are testing us for dominance will signal the intention to attack redundantly and long before it happens. Inability to read the body language, coupled with ignorance of a species’ biology can have fatal consequences. Exemplary is a large and rather safe tourist industry that has developed around habituated and tame bears in North America, while some persons have lived with tamed black and grizzly bears for decades. Negative conditioning to habitat can lead to deliberate or inadvertent population crashes. The survival of large predators may depend on systematic conditioning to avoid humans. Cannibalism among predators involves larger stalking smaller, with predators made wary of being stalked. It is proposed that by targeting stimuli to which large carnivores cannot habituate, such as the sounds of stalking or the bold behavior of armed humans, they can be systematically conditioned to avoid humans. Inefficient and enduring hunting does that, generating a “Freedom of the Woods” – that is, safety for all outdoor users.

Although science forms the basis of wildlife conservation in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, advocacy and inadequate scholarship have led to conservation legislation that is destroying the wolf as a species. “Wolf science” is flawed due to the denial of historical information about wolves, ignoring how wolves explore new prey, ignoring long-standing research on the social organization and its changes in wolves, ignoring hybridization as a cause of the genomic extinction, the use of genetic data without a taxonomic verification of specimen, misuse of mathematics, and espousing meaningless statistics. Wolves cannot be conserved as a species in settled landscapes. So called wolf conservation in North America and in Europe is in need of reevaluation, as it is destroying a genuine canid species.

From the outset, humans evolved with severe conflict with wildlife, but which they mastered with great ingenuity. We are the only primate that can exist on the ground with large predators, day and night, and are not dependent on climbing trees or cliffs for security. Consequently, we regressed in climbing adaptations and body strength. Without that mastery over predators, there would have been no human evolution. This mastery led to a transfer of resources from predators and competitors to our self, followed very early by dispersal out of Africa into Europa and Asia. The archaeological record keeps hinting at predator-free conditions. At the end of the last glaciation, mega-faunal extinctions generated new challenges for humans, as the virtual absence of mega-herbivores profoundly changed the ecosystems, as fires replaced herbivores in consuming vegetation. Also, wolves escaped extinction, but not their enemies and competitors. Consequently, since the natural limitations on their numbers had been diminished, wolves had to be controlled, and native people rose to the task. Only in societies with disarmed citizens were wolves a menace, and legislation that frees wolves from human control eventually recreates that very menace. North America’s Pleistocene native wildlife survived under extremes in predation, such as was not experienced in Eurasia or Africa. Consequently, our native wildlife species, being quick and accurate learners, readily habituate and are very good at taking advantage of us. Problem wildlife may be created by humans’ irrational wishes which conflict with the biology of a species. This is well illustrated by current efforts at wolf conservation here and in Europe, where the unintended consequence is the assured destruction of the wolf as a species.