“…Perhaps, killing a predator returning to a carcass soon after predation might protect other livestock (Woodroffe et al, 2005), but experiments with such methods also show surprisingly high error rates (Sacks et al, 1999). Indeed, recent, independent research in several regions found killing wild animals could exacerbate future threats to human interests, e.g., cougars (Cooley et al, 2009a;Peebles et al, 2013), birds (Bauer et al, 2018;Beggs et al, 2019), and wolves (Santiago-Avila et al, 2018a) -without requiring us to delve into the unresolved controversy and contested evidence about wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains, USA or in Southern Europe (Wielgus and Peebles, 2014;Bradley et al, 2015;Fernández-Gil et al, 2015;Imbert et al, 2016;Poudyal et al, 2016;Kompaniyets and Evans, 2017). The uncertainties about predator removal reflect the indirect application unlike the lion and the goat hypothetical above.…”