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I completely agree that over hunting and wanton waste by hunters exercising their treaty and aboriginal rights has greatly affected the decline in caribou.

In the 1980's the Beverly herd in Northern Saskatchewan came much further south than usual, putting them into close proximity to several small native communities. At first, the Dene elders went out by snowmobile to their traditional hunting grounds farther north, and shot their usual winter meat requirements - more than they could bring home in one trip. On the return trip to retrieve meat, they found many more caribou much closer to town. So they shot some of them, and didn't get back to the original carcasses that trip. The pattern continued a couple more cycles, until caribou were actually walking thru the towns. Bored young men who had never hunted before took to killing caribou for fun. The northern stores were sold out of ammunition. The lakes were covered with so many frozen caribou carcasses that planes could no longer land on the ice. In the spring every community stank of rotting carcasses, every trapper shack in the bush was surrounded by rotting maggoty meat in huge piles, and the lakes were polluted with the stench. My good friend was a conservation officer at the time, who could only document the destruction because he couldn't arrest enough people to make a difference. The entire dossier of evidence that he collected was suppressed by our provincial government, and he was told to drop it or lose his career. So he quit and sent he documentation to a local hunting magazine. The resulting political furor caused a few changes, but not much really. Nobody can mess with aboriginal hunting rights in Canada, no matter how destructive some practises are. Our Beverly herd which was estimated about a half million in the 1980 is now extinct.

But wanton waste and harassment by snowmobiles is not the whole story. Every herd in Canada is in steep decline. Some of those herds don't have nearly the amount of pressure from native hunters that the Beverly herd did.

Across the Siberian arctic, reindeer are in decline as well. Scandinavia appears to be in flux, some herds actually increasing, most in decline.

So I agree that people are one of the big factors, but an even bigger factor is how the climate in the polar regions is changing, and a lot of dedicated smart scientists are measuring cause and effect and have convinced me that their data does not lie and that their conclusions are real. Warming of arctic regions is having an effect on the ecosystem, and caribou are feeling those effects. And the effects of unregulated hunting. And the effects of human activity like snowmobiles and roads. And the effects of predators and disease. It's all pretty depressing.