Stuff like this gives a satisfying sense of restoring order. This is the way things were before dramatic human intervention. The ironic part is that the restoration itself requires human intervention. I always find myself wondering what would happen if humans just disappeared overnight. How things are now would be the starting point of the "new natural." Ecosystems probably wouldn't return to the way they were before Europeans arrived; they would proceed along some new pathway. Not least because of how much we've already changed the climate, and the species we've introduced. Then I think about a time 100,000 years after this hypothetical disappearance of humans and picture conservationists of whatever species, aliens maybe, concerned with protecting the indigenous species they found like wild cows, Himalayan blackberry and kudzu, that are now endangered by overdevelopment and global cooling.
Anyway it would be really interesting to be able to chart the changes to this microcosm of a prairie ecosystem over thousands of years if there were no human intervention whatsoever.
Wild cows won't really happen, aside from them being easy prey, milk cows can't even feed their young because they produce so much milk that they drown them. They have to feed the babies with a bottle.
Idk my Dad worked on a dairy farm part time when I was a kid and I've never heard of that. That's just not how teats and udders work. There is nothing here about how the cow makes too much milk and will drown the calf.
He may have been pulling your leg. We bottle feed the calves formula, because to allow the calves to drink the milk would defeat the purpose of raising dairy cows. Also teat cleanliness and health is huge; suckling causes problems.
Incidentally, wild cows actually are a thing in a bunch of far-flung places. I saw them in the Aleutian islands (some genius brought them up there thinking he could get a beef business going and just left them when it of course failed) and they're mean as hell. There's a bunch of feral cattle on the Big Island of Hawaii as well, and TIL there are ~5 million stray cows in India where it illegal to kill them for religious reasons, which creates a massive problem for transport infrastructure, and gave rise to possibly my all-time favorite wikipedia article title:
Definitely more of a luxury exercise. A sort of zoo with even more researchers and administrators watching over
Id personally put that money into fighting the Pine Beatles which at this moment are killing huge swathes of existing wildlife and ecosystems. But that’s hard laborious work.
Anyway it would be really interesting to be able to chart the changes to this microcosm of a prairie ecosystem over thousands of years if there were no human intervention whatsoever.