L. David Mech Quotes

Lucyan David Mech , also known as Dave Mech, is an American wolf expert, a senior research scientist for the U.S. Department of the Interior , currently with the Department of Interior's U.S. Geological Survey , and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. He has researched wolves since 1958 in places such as Minnesota, Ellesmere Island, Canada, Italy, Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, and on Isle Royale.

Mech is the founder of the International Wolf Center and sits on its board of directors as vice chair. The project to create the facility, which he started in 1985, was a natural outgrowth of his wolf research as well as his ambition to educate people about the nature of wolves that they may come to respect the creature through understanding.

He has published eleven books and approximately 380 scientific papers and 100 popular articles about wolves and other wildlife, including The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species and Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation which he co-edited with Luigi Boitani . Both books remain in print as of 2017. The 1997 book The Arctic Wolf: Ten Years with the Pack received an Honorable Mention by the National Outdoor Book Award . His latest book with Doug Smith and Dan MacNulty is Wolves on the Hunt: the Behavior of Wolves Hunting Wild Prey. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. January 1937
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L. David Mech: 10   quotes 0   likes

Famous L. David Mech Quotes

“Mr. Ellis is neither a scientist nor an expert on the natural behavior of wolves.”

B.J. King, "Why Are Wolf Scientists Howling At Jodi Picoult?" NPR. (April 19, 2012).

“It is beyond ridiculous that wolves need to study a human or that they are capable of it.”

On Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf, as quoted in Tom Myrick. International Wolf Center Nominates Picoult's Lone Wolf for Scat Award http://www.wolf.org/wolves/news/pdf/picoults_release_final.pdf. IWC Scat Awards. (March 8, 2012).

L. David Mech Quotes about wolves

“In the recent past, wolves were labeled a flagship species or an umbrella, indicator, or keystone species, depending on what conservation market one was trying to penetrate… A flagship species is an attraction to nearly all society's strata, but wolves are not welcomed by all factions of society. With a few rare exceptions, the rural world opposes wolves, so the animal's flagship role is restricted primarily to urbanites or to local areas. Wolves are certainly a powerful flagship species for the conservation movement, particularly that of affluent societies with strong lobbies in large cities, but a true flagship species should be able to move an entire society toward a goal.
Neither are wolves a good umbrella species (i. e., a species, usually high in the ecological pyramid, whose conservation necessarily fosters that of the rest of the chain) in that they can live well on a variety of food resources and in areas with an impoverished prey base. Wolves are not a keystone species either, in that they are not essential for the presence of many other species (e. g., herbivores flourish in areas devoid of wolves). And wolves are not necessarily indicators of good habitat quality or integrity because they are too generalist to be good indicators of the presence of a pristine trophic chain.
The above labels have been very useful in many circumstance and have contributed significantly to wolf recovery. They may still be useful in the future, but we should be aware that they are shortcuts to "sell a product" rather than good scientific grounds on which to build conservation.”

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

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