
caught in frost and snow,in the mountains of north
The Science of a Healthy Life
Conservation Letters recently published a new study over how a small, monetary change in a wildlife compensation system in Sweden ended up more than doubling up the number of Swedish Wolverines (Gulo gulo). If your only experience with the wolverine is the Hugh Jackman Hollywood mutant, then all you need to picture in the back of your mind is a really, really big ferret that is specialized to thrive in snowy regions.
Gulo gulo is a small, ball of fur and muscles, an animal as cute as it is wonderfully ferocious and brave. And despite being a small 20 something kilo ball of brown fur it has been known to go toe to toe even with animals as big as a Grizzly just to protect it´s own kill. A predator that is specialized to hunt and survive in the arctic countries and regions, spanning a global area from Russia, Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska and northern China. The Swedish wolverine despite it´s predatory super powers was rapidly heading towards extinction in 1960 with less than 100 wolverines left in the country.
At which point the wolverine was declared a protected species and as such illegal to hunt. A change that did put an end to the decline in Swedish Wolverines, but the species still did not manage to substantially increase its population.
Human hunting
Gulo gulo is such a capable animal that there are no natural explanations at all for this animal to not increase far beyond the abysmal rate which was now seen in Sweden. It is very much an apex predator that thrives and dominates in it´s natural, widespread snow covered territories with very few, if any, natural enemies beyond homo sapiens.
The Conservation letters study also reveal that illegal hunting was the major factor that continued to hold back the wolverine´s population increase after being listed as endangered in Sweden.

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Changing course towards a sustainable and fulfilling World
The sole reason why such a harmless predator (as ferocious as it is, it poses no threat at all to humans) was hunted to the point of extinction was, as so often is the case, about monetary compensation.
The Swedish Rangifer tarandus "farmers" witnessed how the wolverine, whose main prey around the world is the various species of Deer, from the north American Caribou to the Scandinavian 'vild ren', decimated the domesticated as well as wild population of Rangifer tarandus, and since they felt that the monetary compensation was smaller per killed deer then the perceived problems and loss of income the wolverine caused them, the answer was to illegally hunt and kill adult wolverines, and to trap and dig out and kill newly-born wolverine cubs.
The positive change in Sweden happened when the state changed the monetary compensation around 2002, instead of paying the farmers for each individually killed deer, which is how it used to be. They instead started to get compensated for each successful litter of new Wolverines.
In other words, all of a sudden, the farmers had an incentive to make sure the Wolverines could not just survive in the wild, but to safely multiply and breed and increase in numbers.
The result was simple, clear and positive.
Ten years after the compensation was changed, all of a sudden the Swedish Wolverine population had more than doubled up in size (to around 700 Wolverines as of today).
This simple understanding of how the human community directly affect our wildlife and the major cause and effect it has on animal species is something that hopefully will lead to similar changes around the world.
Not just for wolverines, but to protect our Elephants, Tigers, Lions, Cheetahs, Wolves, Lynx, Eagles and Rhinos.
The fastest way forward is clearly to involve the community and to compensate them for each new generation of predators and other endangered wildlife being born and thriving.
When people that might otherwise not care about an animals fate, or even look the other way despite knowing better, when they get compensated to care and to make sure that the animals not just survive, but also thrive and increase in numbers. When that gets tied into that communities own financial success, change happens over night.
Another positive revelation from that small monetary compensation change in Sweden is that since the new compensation started not a single Wolverine litter has been dug out of their home and killed.
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Writer and photography
Michael A Koontz
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