Scandinavia and the World

Because it's expensive to host. It's not the country itself that has the job of hosting (though they can help here and there), it's the TV station that is part of the European Broadcasting Union that has to bear the brunt of the costs. And considering how more and more public TV is losing viewers, nobody wants to win it twice in a row these days. Not even the Eastern European nations.

To be fair, the costs of Eurovision might seem high at a glance, but when you consider how large the audience is and how much of the cost is already covered if you've paid your EBU membership (as a national broadcaster) it's not expensive at all. Even national talent shows might cost more per season than hosting Eurovision, and Eurovision Song Contest is one of the events with the largest international TV audience in the world - probably #1 after sports. If this suggests that you might want to stop paying for the EBU membership, you must remember that it also gets you all sorts of news footage (also from sporting events and such) that you have to by from other sources if you're not getting it for "free" from Eurovision (ie, the channel that also hosts the song contest).

Bear Whisperer.

Ya know, I'm more like Finland when dealing with bears on my property. Only I don't shout "Perkele!". Maybe I should...

I've had to chase off bears before. One time I ran right after him with a firewood ax in broad daylight no less, another I came out with a loaded Mosin-Nagant rifle, bayonet fixed and ready. Both times they just ran off.

Bears around here run away from aggressive humans. Rarely do you find em stand their ground.

edited 26th May '18 6:57:32 AM by MajorTom

I've really never wanted to test how aggressive a bear is to be honest. So my internal monologue is both of you stop getting so close to that bear.

^ Around these parts, unless they're so hungry they don't give a damn ^note Which is rare, usually an indicator of extremely short food supplies owing to drought, fire or an overabundance of competitors, among other things. Most ornery bears just want to eat rather than pick fights. or have cubs, bears run away every time.

Right, most animals will gladly avoid humans with pointy sticks if they can help it. Just watch out for starving bears and cubs, and don't corner them.

Oh, and here are the two videos in question:

edited 27th May '18 8:11:16 AM by Redmess

I've only seen bears in the wild once. I was a kid, maybe about 10 or 12 or so, and we were fishing. As we walked from the car to the lake, we saw bear dropping but didn't think much of it, other than to avoid stepping on it.

On our way back to the car a few hours later, we saw a couple of bear cubs. They were pretty far away - I'd guess about 20-30 metres - and of course we didn't try to approach them. We kept walking to the car, and noticed that on the opposite side from us, the mother was watching, from pretty far.

We knew that getting between a mother bear and its cubs was dangerous, so we walked faster (but didn't run) to the car, and as we were opening the doors we saw that the cubs hadn't moved much, but the mother had started to approach us. We got in the car and left.

I'm sure if we had approached the cubs or stayed between them and the mother for longer, we would have been attacked, but the only thing the mother did to drive us away was approach us silently and slowly, so it wasn't very aggressive.

Hey, now I know how to pronounce "perkele"! That bear reaction could have come out of a cartoon, it is great. The video goes on for too long, though. I kept specking something else to happen.

The Canadian video is just adorable.

Yeah, that bear sure got startled. Proof that even animals with great smell can be surprised at times.

Man the largest wild animal I've ever had to deal with was one fox that wouldn't leave our animals alone, a bunch of wacks with a shovel only knocked it out, had to drop a fencepost on its head to kill it.

That and I used to have to regularly fight a goose, used a pitchfork for that.

How did the goose hold the pitchfork? I thought they didn't have hands.

It was a goosefork. "Perkela!"

It's "perkele".

I grew up kind of in the woods, albeit in a town. There were a couple of occasions where, after school, we were told we couldn't go home on our own because a bear had been seen in one of the residential areas near the school where many of the pupils lived, so we had to wait or have our parents pick us up. It wasn't a long wait, though, and hunters would get a special licence to kill the bear or the police would tranquilize it and take it somehwere far. I almost always went ot school by bike (it was only 2 km) so I'd refuse if a neighbour offered me a ride - I'd rather wait to be allowed to ride my bike than have to walk to school the next day.

I've seen a lynx (just through the car window as we drove in a forested area) and foxes, and of course, elks and reindeer can be a danger in some areas when you're driving, so you have to look out for them (and I've seen plenty of elks where I live, as well as reindeer when I've been to Lapland).

I had a relative we'd visit about once or twice a month who lived about 10 km from the centre of my home town, in the middle of the forest - it was where he grew up, and even though it didn't have electricity or running water, that's where he wanted to live until he could no longer manage on his own. (He died about 10 years ago. He was a WWII veteran.) He always had a cat or two, but unfortunately, every couple of years he'd have to get a new one because they kept being eaten by lynxes or wolves.

I'm a bit sad that I've never seen a wolf in the wild, even from a car.

Where I live now, in a medium-sized city (for Finland - it's well below 100 000 residents), even 5 km from the city centre it's urban enough that the biggest animals I see regularly are stray cats, and the most annoying wildlife here are mosquitoes.

The biggest animals that have attacked me are a horse and a sheep. The horse was when I was very little, at a petting zoo; I reached out to give it some hay, but it bit into the sleeve of my shirt instead and tore it off. Maybe it looked like food? I don't recall if the horse actually ate it, but I do remember that I was sort of laughing and crying at the same time, both out of surprise. The sheep incident happened at a relative's place. They had all sorts of farm animals. We had had watermelon, and we collected the rinds (not sure if this is the right word) to feed to the sheep. As I was feeding them, one of them stretched its head out a bit further from the fence than I had expected, with the result than when it bit into the watermelon rind, it also gave my finger a good chomp. As you can see, I exaggerated a little bit when I described these as "attacks" at the beginning of this paragraph.

Wait how are cats the biggest things you get in an urban environment? Are urban foxes not a thing where you live?

I see more foxes living in a city than I did growing up in the countryside, rural foxes are sneaky, urban foxes give no shits.

edited 27th May '18 6:31:16 PM by Silasw

Why was you even fighting a goose in the first place? That sounds like a good way to get bitten. Don't they have teeth on their tongues or something crazy like that?

The biggest wild animal I have ever had to deal with was a tiny monkey who found my way to my apartment one day. Too much of a city boy, I am. That was one lost monkey, though. I mean, I guess my building is not that far from the mountain where it lived, but there was still one full block filled with buildings. And it had to cross the street at last once, where was it trying to go?

Today I learned urban foxes are a thing! I seriously didn't know that. The only urban animals here are cats, dogs, rats, etc. My city have plenty forested areas, so you can see some monkeys and capyvaras in certain places, but they aren't really "urban".

edited 27th May '18 6:36:42 PM by Heatth

I've never seen an urban fox but I'm also not urban. And yes you can probably scare away a bear with sound. But I've always preferred to do that before I met the bear. Wore a bear bell often travel in groups etc

The most fearsome animals around here are probably cows and horses. Though herbivores are not to be underestimated, they tend to be very territorial, plenty of them have horns, and are not afraid to use them on humans.

I know that in some places there are urban foxes, but I've never seen one or really heard of any where I live. Now you've got me wondering why that is...

I guess I do see dogs that are bigger than cats, but I never see dogs that are not on a leash, so I didn't count them. (My cats are on a leash when they're out, as well, but some people do let their cats out even though there's traffic and everything, so when I see a stray cat I can never be sure whether it's homeless or just out having fun. You can tell by the fur if you get a close look, but typically they won't approach you so you can't tell.)

The most adorable animals I see are hedgehogs, though that's mostly in the autumn. Sometimes when I take my cat for a late-night walk, she'll spot a hedgehog and I'll have to find the balance between letting the cat satisfy her curiosity by approaching the hedgehog, and not bothering the hedgehog - so I'll leave about 2-3 metres between them, and if the hedgehog wants to leave, I won't let the cat chase it.

When I was maybe about 12 or 13 or so, I was asked to take out the trash. It was a bit of a walk, though, so I decided I'll just leave the bag outside and take it to the - to use a delightful British term for it - wheelie bin in the morning on my way to school.

Very late at night, when I had just fallen asleep, I was woken by a strange sound from outside. I went to look, and what do you know: a hedgehog had found the tied trash bag and decided that that's a great place to sleep for the night, or make a nest. The problem was that it had managed to get in through the hole left by the tied handles, but it couldn't get out. I put a glove on one hand and opened the bag. The hedgehog was obviously scared and rolled into a ball, so I just gently nudged it out of the bag and re-tied it and took the bag to the bin, having learned my lesson.

When I got back (which was about a minute later - it wasn't that long of a walk), the hedgehog was still there. People had raked leaves into piles nearby, so I don't think the hedgehog will have had any trouble finding a warm and comfortable bed even though I had taken away its first choice.

edited 28th May '18 5:49:32 AM by BestOf

Around my house we get some foxes and coyotes, although I’ve never had an encounter with either that went beyond me seeing them from a moderate distance and them promptly leaving in response. (I’ve actually seen both within the last week or two while giving my dog a late night walk, both times she wanted to either fight or hunt the wild animal instead of minding our business.) The worst trouble I’ve heard of either causing is one time when a pair of foxes had chased a local cat up a tree and were camped out by the base of the tree trying to wait it out. Then a guy passed by walking his dog and the foxes decided to leave and try to find other prey. (I did once come across part of the body of a rabbit that either a coyote or a fox must have caught, it’s amazing how intact the head and front haunches were and then there just wasn’t anything further down...)

Deer are occasionally an issue too, especially if the group includes a big stag who’s used to thinking he’s king of everything, but I never had anything like an encounter with them here, they’re pretty content to just go their own way when they see humans around.

My fiancée’s parents, who live relatively nearby but are definitely more out in the woods, get a lot more activity, including a large pack of coyotes you can hear hunting at night, a bear that has occasionally left its droppings in their front yard, rumors of a mountain lion, and deer that feel much more at home and willing to challenge local residents and animals, including a time when one of those stags mentioned earlier had a face off with an enormous dog they had at the time. (Our best guess was that this dog was part Pitbull and part Great Dane, so we’re talking a big strong dog with a head like a cement block)

Anyway, the dog had barked at and he was having a stare down with the stag, and it was pretty obvious that the stag was thinking about teaching the dog a lesson for having the temerity to do so, but we eventually got them separated without any bloodshed.

edited 28th May '18 6:19:28 AM by TheWanderer

Well, since there are dog species that can take on lions and elephants (Boerboel dogs for example), I can imagine some dogs COULD take on a stag.

edited 28th May '18 8:35:28 AM by Redmess

It was our guard goose, we had him to protect the chickens and ducks against any fox cubs that got though our fencing. I had to fight because he was a goose and didn’t seem to understand that I was just outing the chickens and ducks away and giving all of them food for the night.

Maybe the fox breads you get in your area don’t go urban? Aparently London’s urban fox population (estimated to be around 10,000) helps keeps rats under control. It is also possible that cultural difference and city design variance means that Finish cities aren’t as hospitable to urban foxes as British ones are.

I have the impression that our cities are cleaner than those in the UK - as in, less trash that's in bins a fox might be able to break into or turn over, and so on. Usually, the bins here tend to be in a closed area outside the building, like a sort of shack.

We also might have more active animal control service (I had to look that term up in English, so I've learned a new word/phrase today). Dogs that are lost in an urban area are usually found in a few days at most - probably faster now that they tend to have a chip, and people have access to social media to see if people have put up posts about missing pets or ones that have been seen wandering about. Without checking it I'd assume that animal control officers would also collect any foxes they find, but I honestly don't know if I'm supposed to call somewhere if I see a fox in the city.

It could also be that the areas around urban centres and suburbs are so friendly to foxes that they don't feel the need to wander into inhabited zones, because there are forests everywhere. Then again, I could also imagine that traffic would scare the foxes into staying away from the edges of forested areas, but if that's the case, the UK foxes should also have a similar situation with traffic. Maybe our foxes have the option to avoid traffic, while those in the UK have so small habitats that they will always have to learn to get used to traffic?

Or maybe foxes don't wander around Finnish homes because Finnish food is so awful that if we throw it away, a fox wouldn't eat it.

I expect that street tidiness plays a big factor, while UK streets aren’t horrible we don’t have to have the same kind of protection from the elements for our bins that you might. That and particularly in London there’s a sizeable population of homeless people, that means a lot more food being left around that can sustain foxes.

We tend to have our bins out just the day of and not to have any element protection. Only insistence you lock the compost one too.

edited 28th May '18 1:09:18 PM by phantom1

It probably helps that London does not have bears around to protect trash from.