Elder Knowledge Does Not Protect the Caribou

© National Park Service, Alaska Region

It was recently determined by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador that the George River herd of caribou, at the northern end of Labrador, is at “critically low” numbers (with only 8,938 animals left: down 37% from the 14,200 counted in 2014). Environment and Climate Change Minister Perry Trimper correctly assessed the situation when he told CBC News, “There’s a certain minimum number of individuals that you’d need to get your population going in the right direction, and we’re very concerned that we are very quickly moving to that point of no return.”[teaserbreak]

They may have already passed it when you consider that the herd has declined by a staggering 99% since the 1990s. In human terms, if something had caused 6,930,000,000 of us to die in the last two decades, might we not worry and try to prevent any further mortality?

Has the Newfoundland and Labrador government banned hunting? Yes, although only since 2013. It’s the least that can be done—and the obvious, prudent choice.

But, hunting still continues. That’s because the elders of the aboriginal communities in this remote and rugged region believe that there are still enough to be hunted.

In the past, native hunting did not wipe out this herd. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it ought not to now. However, unlike then, hunting is now highly efficient. We have snowmobiles, high-powered scoped rifles, and aircraft to find the last animals—not to mention more hunters and poachers (and the possibly negative effect of climate change and the introduction of toxins into the environment). Caribou, and indeed large wildlife species everywhere, are in decline.

Of course, as in southern British Columbia, where another caribou herd is under pressure, predators are also being blamed. Wolves and other predators, like native people, have hunted caribou sustainably for thousands of years. But, unlike native people, they have not greatly enhanced their hunting success and are far more likely to focus on calves and on animals dying from disease, injury, or old age.

The world is changing. Native elders have never experienced the changes now wrought in what scientists are increasingly calling the Anthropocene era: the next great wave in extinction.

We are the enemy of biodiversity and of species. And, it is not the wolf at the door who is the problem; it is us.

Keep wildlife in the wild,
Barry