I suspect this video applied to you more than me. I gave up hospital work a couple of years ago, but this made me laugh because of some (hyperbolic) similarities. There are many improvements, and AI helps formulate notes, but paperwork is still a big part. I also don’t get paid in cafeteria vouchers, and I really have wonderful coworkers and bosses..
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Reminds me of when I was an assistant apartment manager and had dozens of keys; I decided one day that in heaven there will be no keys. It’s a happy thought.
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Definitely no keys. The use of locks reveals how the societies have changed. A century ago, in the sparsely populated rural areas of Finland, people often did not lock the doors when they left from their home. A broomstick that was put sideways before the door told that there was nobody home, so others knew to wait for the return of the owners if they wanted to meet them.
Still today, there is something left of the trusting attitude in some rural places. There are some small self-service farm stores where anybody can fetch a small amount of the products of the farm (like potatoes) and leave the payment in a box that is not guarded. No owners present and no video surveillance.
The same attitude is seen in the way how in the countryside, even the smallest children may walk to school without their parents. During the last decades, the limit has usually been 5km of walking to the school, if it is longer the children get the right to use school busses. Even that has changed lately but not because of human threats. Wolf populations have increased to the point where parents fear for their small children and therefore arrange cars for traveling through the locations with most intense wolf activity.
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We live in a relatively small town of 3500, and many homes sell vegetable produce and fruit “on your honor,” helping ourselves and leaving payment. Children sometimes walk to school, but generally not that far. I have read of the sharp increase of wolves in Finland recently. That would be frightening. They have somewhat similar concerns in the upper peninsula iin Michigan, but we have no known packs currently in the lower peninsula. Coyotes are present, and I have seen some large ones that would make me want to keep an eye on smaller children.
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Many patients and staff like to play with inflated gloves–one of the staff was very artistic in our office recently! I guess these are suggestions for when we have to wait in a doc’s office in the future!
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Wolves are not frightening as long as they fear humans. I have been less than 15m from a wolf during midnight and the wolf just escaped. Problems emerge when the fear disappears.
Those with ‘extreme’ attitudes towards hunting managed to halt practically all hunting of large carnivores for almost three years. They utilized effectively the laws in a way that halted hunting during the hunting periods, as solving the cases in the court took longer than the hunting periods lasted. There was a need to change the laws both at the level of EU and nationally before the hunting could start again.
During the period of no hunting, the populations of all large predators increased much. Some of the predators also seemed to loose their fear towards humans. Wolf individuals watching children walking to home from a distance of less than 50m, wolves eating prey and resting openly 100-200m from an elementary school during the school day and cases that forced the police to order the killing of a few wolves. Brown bears became more confident in moving in the backyards. There were even two cases where a lynx became a threat - these wanted to eat small dogs in the leash despite the owner being with the dog (the European lynx males may weigh more than 30 kg, that equals a small cougar).
This winter a controlled hunting of wolves in the most problematic areas was allowed again, with 100 licences. Most of the 100 licences were used in a few days. Now the researchers follow what happens, so that the authorities learn what the impact of removing almost 100 wolves will be. Future hunting will be adjusted based on the information they get.
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I was told by a wildlife ranger, concerning coyotes getting bold enough to attack dogs with humans present, that shooting to kill doesn’t teach as much as shooting to cause pain and suffering: in the former, a member of the pack is just dead, but in the latter coyotes have sufficient empathy to recognize that they, too, could suffer so.
So when I hike in coyote territory with .22 on my hip, I don’t shoot for a quick kill, I shoot to teach a lesson: bothering humans and their animals is a bad idea.
I presume this would apply to wolves as well.
BTW, I know it applies to bears: Some people got in trouble over it, but when bears started raiding trash cans in a suburb in Washington state, people tried to scare them off but little had noticeable effect. But one homeowner instead added something to the trash that made bears very sick – and bears stopped bothering that house and those several houses to either side. Sadly the courts decided that this was cruel, despite the fact that the alternatives – including wildlife officers trapping and relocating bears – weren’t working.
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Wolves are smart, probably smarter than average dogs. They have also good senses and can often deduce what may have happened without seeing the event, from smells combined with visual observations and from the changes in the social contacts.
Shooting to wound might scare the animals for some time but it is against the animal welfare laws. Rubber shots might be accepted but it is difficult to get close enough to hit an agile wolf so that the animal will behave as wanted.
There has previously been attempts to remove subdominant individuals from wolf packs, with the hope that the alpha individuals will teach the fear of humans to their cubs. That proved to be difficult because in a quickly changing hunting situation in a forested landscape, it is not easy to tell if the wolf that passed was an alpha or subdominant individual. Quite many alpha individuals died, which often leads to the rest of the individuals dispersing and ending up in inhabited areas.
Now they are testing the removal of whole packs from regions where there are many packs with small territories. Some individuals always manages to escape, which should strengthen the effect.
The resarchers have collected scats for DNA analyses every year, so they have data from a large proportion of Finnish wolves. A DNA sample is taken from all dead wolves, which gives a possibility to estimate the percentages of known vs. unknown individuals and also the potential effects of the removal to the genetical diversity of the wolf population.
The analyses also give a better estimate of the numbers of wolfXdog hybrids. The analyses suggest that there are crudely 10-20 such hybrids among the wolves, many originating from Russia. The hybrids are not classified as wolves but as ‘alien species’ that need to be removed from the nature to protect the wolf populations.
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Dude, I felt like I was just given an ministry pep-talk and read a scientific journal at the same exact time.
Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?
