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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I wonder if I'll get to feel the same about golden eagles soon too.
Same. Sometimes one of my deer will get thwacked by a car just hard enough it stumbles up my driveway and falls over. There will be 3 golden eagles and 2 bald eagles fighting over it. The first time I saw them I had a double-take ... I swore at first I saw men sitting on my driveway fence. Golden eagles are massive and quite awe inspiring to watch. When they fight over road kill they stretch their wings out entirely.
Each time I have to make sure I still have an outdoor cat and I have to keep an eye on him until they are done. They seem to only eat the soft bits and leave the muscle meat for the ravens. Then the deer turns into a fly factory which I have to spray.
A lady sitting in front of me at the football said she could feel the vibrations in her chest when I was loudly booing at the footy.
I had an x-ray a couple of years ago and was asked if I was a smoker, strangely because of the size of my lungs. Apparently, ironically, smokers lungs are larger than average and I have to assume it's to balance out all the damage that smoking does. I used to be a swimmer, so I figured my lungs must have developed from the requirement of controlled breathing as part of swimming (and the general fitness and therefore additional oxygen processing requirements).
I do not understand to what you are referring by "is hardly known and of little importance culturally".
Your statement is completely unrelated with the parent article. Contrary to what you say, the golden eagle is by far the best known species of eagle and the one with the greatest cultural importance. In a large part of Eurasia, for at least 5 millennia or more the golden eagle has been the most culturally important species of bird.
The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is the species of eagle that has become the state symbol of the late Roman Republic and then of the Roman Empire.
Inspired by the Romans, during the last couple of millennia many other states have included the golden eagle in their heraldic symbols and several of them are still using it today.
Even much earlier than the Romans, at all Indo-European people the golden eagle had a special importance, being the bird used as a messenger by the God of the Sky, later known as Zeus in Greece and as Jupiter at the Romans. Already the Hittite texts from 3500 years ago have many references to the golden eagle.
The golden eagle is also the species that has been the most valued as a domesticated hunting bird in Central Asia.
The use of the "bald" eagle by USA has also been inspired by the Roman golden eagle, but the original species was replaced with a native American species. The golden eagles have survived in small pockets spread over a very large area from Western Europe to USA, so they were not representative for USA alone.
While the sea eagles, to which the American "bald" eagle also belongs, are bigger than the golden eagle (whose preferred habitat are the high mountains), the golden eagle is stronger for its size and she is able to hunt bigger prey in proportion to its size. Only some jungle eagles, like the harpy eagle, are definitely stronger and able to carry heavier prey.
The reason is that sheep have always been guarded by shepherds and dogs.
The reintroduction of eagles can create problems only where lambs are completely unguarded, in order to save some money over the traditional methods.
So the choice between letting eagles live and exterminating them is not between raising sheep and not raising sheep, but between using a traditional level of care for them and a slightly cost-saving modern method, which has eliminated a part of the jobs associated with sheep raising.
A solution for the AI-hyped era, where paying human employees is frowned upon, would be to use robot dogs for scaring raptor birds.
I don’t see it mentioned in the article but was our largest bird of prey?
EDIT: found it; the white tailed eagle[1].
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/white-tailed-eagl...
Eagles are the biggest birds of prey which are active hunters.
A few species of vultures are much bigger than eagles, up to twice heavier.
In Europe, previously there was rather widespread a bird of prey that is intermediate in size and in appearance between eagles and true vultures, the so-called bearded vulture.
Unfortunately the bearded vulture and the true vultures have been exterminated in many parts of Europe by using poisoned dead animals.
For the bearded vulture, the Romans used a much better name, "ossifraga", which means "break-bones" (from which the word "osprey" comes, due to a confusion about the birds for which the name was used). The bearded vulture was called "break-bones", because it eats only bones, after breaking them by letting them fall on a rock from a great height.
Before the disappearances of the golden eagles and of the bearded vultures, they provided some of the most spectacular views in high mountains, due to their exquisite flying prowess.
There's an enormous difference between weighing the pros and cons and coming to a different conclusion than somebody else, and having no sympathy for somebody else.
Having weighed the pros and cons, I have come to the conclusion that the correct amount of (emotional) sympathy for the position of "we should kill all the eagles because farmers deserve only endless profits, never (minor) costs" is infinitesimal.
There's an enormous difference between having no sympathy for an idea and having no sympathy for a person.
2. Farms that keep sheep have more than one lamb.
3. The government doesn't, and shouldn't, intervene to protect people against every single risk they face in business.