Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses, rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, racoons, big cats, snapping turtles, electric eels, lots of arthropods, and most of all other humans or machines created by humans. This is the reason for small children never should walk unprotected by unsafe areas. For children there is a change at least of surviving a close encounter with a wolf, that will not enjoy if is a buffalo instead.

Curiously today the local press tells a story about a man that died after four years fighting lyme disease caused by a deer tick bite. For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related?

Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population. But neither explanation has anything to do with wolves. In fact, wolf numbers in The Netherlands have doubled over the past year, and we're still seeing an increase in ticks.

True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the role of wolves as predators.

In the other hand, to put your "population of wolves has doubled between 2014 and 2015 but ticks had not changed" claim in context, we need to note that wolf population in the Netherlands between years 1869 and 2013 was composed of zero wolves.

Then, in 4-Jul-2013 something very strange happened. A she-wolf was found dead in a roadside next Luttelgeest. The first confirmed case of a "dutch" wolf in 140 years. A study in the journal Lutra covered the issue concluding that:

1) The animal was a purebreed wolf genetically related with East Europe populations [discarding a dog-wolf mix or a sarloos dog], was unchipped, and between 1.5 and 2.5 years old.

2) She fed on beaver in either the Carpathian mountains or the Eifel which is too far for the animal to have walked (9Km/h) from by itself within the 24 hours needed to digest its last meal (Genetic analysis from the remains of the beaver and the wolf linked both animals with populations living in this areas).

3) Bullet impacts and shattered fragments where found in the chest and flank indicating that the animal was shot twice before being hit by a car.

4) No car accident involving an animal was reported to local emergency services in the previous hours to the discovery of the corpse.

5) A discrepancy between the timing of the post mortem and rigor mortis intervals indicated that this wolf was shot prior to illegal transport to the Netherlands, from a distance within 2 days.

[To fake a car accident, running over a previously killed animal is a common procedure to cover environmental crimes against protected species].

Source:

The first wolf found in the Netherlands in 150 years was the victim of a wildlife crime. Lutra. 2013. 56(2): 93-109. Gravendeel, de Groot, Kik, Beentjes, Bergman, Caniglia, Cremers, Fabbri, Groenenberg, Grone, Bruinderink, Font, Hakhof, Harms, Jansman, Janssen, Lammertsma, Laros, Linnartz, van der Marel, Mulder, van der Mije, Nieman, Nowak, Randi, Rijks, Speksnijder & Vonho

Link to the article: http://www.kora.ch/fileadmin/file_sharing/5_Bibliothek/51_KO...

... So in 2013 there was still zero dutch wolves.

Then in 9-march-2015 a single wolf was photographed in Hunze.

So, unless you can show us new data, yes, wolf population was doubled in Netherlands in the last year... but you forgot to mention that is from zero to one animal. Here have your answer to the lack of changes on tick population.

[0] from Vicious: Wolves and Men in America by Jon T. Coleman, Yale University Press, 2008

Typically (not always, but usually), a wolf attack is linked to either human habituation, or disease (rabies), or loss of natural resources (wolves will attack humans if they are "food of last resort"). Humans are, um, kind of dangerous to wolves in general, so typically they do their best to avoid us. There's only two known fatal wolf attacks in North America, and both are linked to habituation. In other areas there was probably more wolf attacks in the past (probably due to encroachment), but at present there's little reason to fear a wolf in North America.

Domestic cattle actually are far more deadly (about 20 fatalities a year in North America). And we haven't even crossed into the territory of the deadliness of, say, automobiles.

Balancing livestock / ranches in areas with wolf populations is definitely a real issue and a far more pressing concern. I think many who engage in both ranching and environmental management do understand the dual need to both balance the environment and make a living off the land. (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wolves-...)

My "gut feel observation" is that a lot of the really overtly binary debates in these sort of "environmentalism vs. hunting" debates comes from people who don't live in rural areas at all. Such as sport-only / pure recreational / trophy type hunters (many who are urban and well off... after all, isn't fox hunting traditionally associated with the UK upper class?) versus strict cute-and-fuzzy-animal environmentalists (many who also are urban and well off). So I'm not sure if the local farmers and hunters at the pub really are the ones you should necessarily point the finger at.