#they'll tend to scatter across an area but coalesce to sleep or move on...but idk how much time they actually spend apart

[ursula-legun]

very much could be wrong about this, but IIRC much of the benefits for deer (and, I'm assuming for now, similarly positioned cervids) in this situation apply at a population level, rather than an individual level.

For areas where natural predators are present at a level that effects deer behavior - while individual deer may experience fear, death, injury, etcetera, deer in general are more mobile, less prone towards certain (extremely dense) levels of congregation, and have a smaller population per area.

This stabilizes the availability of browsable/foragable food, and diminishes the prevalence of some diseases which propagate more readily through dense populations. For example, the growing prevalence of chronic wasting disease is thought to be bolstered by a lack of anxiety in deer; that lack of anxiety is allowing deer to socialize in larger groups and for longer periods of time, as well as spend more time in one area (CWD spreads at least partially via feces and saliva.) This increases the number of transmission vectors as well as the duration of exposure for each vector; so while the emotional experience of each deer may be more dramatic, and likely much more frightening, the health of the deer overall is significantly improved by that fear.

From a philosophical perspective - or ethological, take your pick - I also don't think we should assume that the human experiences surrounding anxiety and pursuit necessarily map well onto the internal experiences of nonhuman animals. Some naturalists/ecologists I was studying with a few years specifically highlighted this very context when talking about the importance of, and difficulties pertaining to, trying to not project human decisionmaking on nonhuman life.

To paraphrase, at length, one of the lessons they taught - we can't directly see the motivations of deer, let alone the interiority of their experience. All we can see is the decisions they make, and we try our best to infer from there. We often see deer flee from mild stimuli, and we therefore assume that deer live in a state of constant terror and anxiety, the conditions that would create a similar sort of behavior in us. But we are not deer! Our bodies are not predisposed towards flight in the way deer are; deer are suited to run far faster, and more frequently, than humans, and it seems safer to assume that they flee at a different threshold of internal motivation, if not an entirely different quality of motivation altogether.

This first sort of assumption is the exact kind of thinking that is warned against when people talk about the dangers of anthropomorphization. There's also the influence of societal views on violence and predation; violence in humans is often framed as something that's a guilty pleasure, a base desire that needs to be abstained from for the good of society, except when it's "unfortunately necessary" (for whatever conditions any group considers to be necessary.) This is frequently projected wholesale onto nonhuman, and especially interspecies, depictions of violence; to give a slightly exaggerated description of this current context as an example, it is presumed that the natural inclination of deer is to be grazing restfully, and that this is both pleasurable and right. It is then presumed that the Violent Predator, due to their unconscionable desires, intrudes upon this restful state by pursuing the deer; we consider this to be offensive from the deer's perspective, and vaguely immoral - if, at best, "unfortunately necessary" - when we judge the actions of the predator.

However....there are other ways of looking at this. Deer run at the slightest provocation, often "spooking" at stimuli as minimal as e.g. a falling branch. Why do we assume that this is unpleasant to them? What if they're constantly waiting around for something to happen, so that they have a reason to get going? What if being chased actually feels good as fuck, to a deer? After all, we assume that the act of hunting - as an obligate predator - is, experientially, indulgent. Something that "shouldn't" be done, but is excused regardless. Is this not dismissive of the circumstances the predator is in, and how that might feel? Or the agency and ability that the prey can bring into play?

(An earlier version of this reply was oversimplifying stuff in this part to the point of just being wrong, and had me saying some things about deer behavior [especially herd dynamics] that I'm not actually sure of, which I've edited out.)

Undoubtedly, running for your life is terrifying, and we can be certain that prey animals in these situations are activated - stressed, displaying agitation, etc. None of the above is meant to imply that elk or deer would voluntarily choose to be pursued by wolves. Rather, I just want to highlight that the interaction between predator and prey is not necessarily as emotionally - or morally - lopsided as it is often portrayed as being. Being pursued by a wolf is terrifying, yes, but if you are a pursuit animal, and if you get away....could it not also be fun? And chasing another animal as a predator seems like a powerful, exciting position to be in, at first brush - but in the long run, the lives of the predators are also at stake in the pursuit. Genuinely, I don't want to replace one anthropomorphic projection with another, but I think we can be confident that the dynamics of predator/prey relationships are at the very least interesting to both parties - engaging, maybe even enriching.

All this is to say that the "cost" of predator reintroduction - in terms of stress on individual prey - is most likely not going to be accurately framed in terms of human emotional valence; moreover, cultural assumptions in the interpretation of pleasure, violence, and morality are a strong bias in untangling the emotional framework that is projected onto these relationships. From my perspective, it seems that most consideration given to the experiences of prey animals in these situations is based in just substituting what we, as humans, would expect to feel in that situation; which seems to be both more and less than what can actually be said.

So, yeah, I do think that people should be proud of ecological shifts that generate these large changes in behavior - human hunters have obviously done a poor job of emulating the dynamics created by these predators; and at the bare minimum, I wouldn't assume that the difference in emotional landscape is worth the ongoing ecological harm of not having these dynamics in play.

(Also worthy of consideration are things like the predator's right to exist, diversity of interior experience as a value unto itself, the fundamental right of all species to a life that has "meaning" and what that could actually entail, cross-species modeling of stress as enrichment, microecological effects of pursuit and predation, etc....but. I think I've rambled enough lol.)

Around the same time as the wolves were released, the mountain lion population, once hunted to local extinction, was becoming re-established as well – having crept back in from wilderness areas in central Idaho. Under these twin pressures, over a period of about 15 years, elk numbers halved.

Those that did survive behaved differently, too: when the wolves were on the prowl, they retreated to the dimly lit comfort of the woods, where they might wander in clandestine bands. They avoided the cougars, most active at night, by steering clear of landmarks where they might be trapped or surprised from above in the dark – ravines, outcrops, embankments. No longer did they live in an environment defined by its waterholes and pastures, or even by its ridgelines and ravines, but by areas now suffused with danger and relief. A psychological topology, this – one marked with hillocks of anxiety and peaks of alarm. Ecologists know this as “the landscape of fear”.

proudly talking about reintroducing carnivores has made the herbivores really anxious really drives home the question of whether it’s moral to torture other creatures for our convenience.

you might oppose farming, but make the farm really big and remove the visible fences have the prey harried to death instead of quickly stunned and that’s… better?