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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

yes for the love of god would someone please make sure the country remains a safe, boring holiday park / dairy farm. will someone think of all that poor livestock / the children!!1

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Well I guess we differ there then, I do like not having to carry a rifle or sprays when i walk outside (we are not allowed). I also like livestock and kids not having to fear a predator that we drove to the outskirts.

I do wonder where you live in the Netherlands and if you just find it convenient to talk about the rural parts without having to face the consequences.

This is everything wrong with the netherlands. The over the top complaining of the “farmers” (factory operator would be more accurate).

Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves. The whole anti wolf movement is just propaganda by the “farmers”.

Very demeaning way of people making their livelihood.

> Wolves stay away from humans, there have been zero human deaths by wolves.

No they don't always stay away, plenty of confirmed stories. Just because there's no deaths yet, does it mean you can continue until it does happen? People have already been attacked.

Wolves generally don't attack people, though, do they?

There are no recent (last half century) documented cases of wolves killing people in Europe as far as I know. The few times people have been bitten by wolves they've been feeding them or doing other stupid stuff.

Nope. The basic rule is that you don't do things with wolves you shouldn't do (like feeding them and thus gradually letting them get comfortable around humans), and that you don't do boneheaded shit like leaving a small child alone in nature (which is common sense in most of the world). For a wolf a three year old child is just about the same as a boar or small deer.

Anyone over the age of 12 though? Wolves won't bother you unless you've managed to fuck up nature to such an extent that they can't find their usual diet (deer, boar, etc.), and even then attacking an adult is really desperate.

There was an interesting interview with an Italian expert about wolves and people in the news this week:

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/10/15/we-zullen-moeten-wennen...

Well it's easy to have zero wolf attacks when there are zero wolves. We also have zero hyena attacks.

There are more than zero wolves in many places of Europe.

As someone who lives in a country with wolves and other apex canids (to the point where we have legal hunting seasons for them), I really don't understand the supposed "consequences" here. Canid populations just aren't an issue. There are no children living in fear (rather, we have to keep kids from trying to approach the cute animals...), nor are the occasional depredation events more than a minor annoyance. If a wolf or big cat in particular eats your lifestock, you file a form with the government for market-value compensation and complain about the hassle at the bar.

"safe and boring holiday park" sounds like a sentence for a country.

there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. It wad his first major piece of non-fiction.

> The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue.

Really not helping their reputation as authoritarian...

> sentence for a country

Sure... It's a developed productive high tech country with agricultural exports leaving Russia in the dust despite 400 times smaller land size, but let's condemn it because it's "safe"

Also ask the farmers, fishers, ASML employees, the police dealing with gang killings and Netherlands being the biggest exporter of ecstasy and European gateway for coke how it's a "holiday park";)

NL has the biggest port in Europe, they get to be the biggest traffic channel for illegal goods. The only one who could've changed that would've been the one to eestablish the country there.

i mean singapore port handles way more traffic... but then it has very strict anti drug laws

also ecstasy is made there in NL, so the port thing is kind of a red herring

I very much like the safe and boring part of it.

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