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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
This year could be a pivotal one for caribou hunters as the government prepares to perform a new population survey on the Bathurst herd this summer.

Former Yellowknives Dene leader Fred Sangris, says "All the caribou biologists should be living on the land for about five months of the year, monitoring the herds, watching the herds and everything else. But they make decisions sitting behind the desk." - NNSL file photo

But former Yellowknives Dene leader Fred Sangris and hunting outfitter Barry Taylor are still mistrusting of the methods used by GNWT biologists and it would be a stretch to say they are even cautiously optimistic.

In January 2010, Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) Minister Michael Miltenberger instituted a complete ban on hunting the Bathurst herd after a 2009 population survey showed the herd had declined to just 32,000 from about 126,000 in 2006. In December 2010, once the Wek'eezhii Renewable Resources Board came up with a management plan to address what scientists said was an accelerated rate of decline, a limited annual aboriginal harvest of 300 was sanctioned, to be split between the Yellowknives Dene and the Tlicho community.

The reduced hunt has been "very, very hard" on the Dene, said Sangris. Taylor, meanwhile, said he and his fellow outfitters have been left completely in the cold.

The recommendations made by the Wek'eezhii Renewable Resources Board will stay in effect until at least this summer, when the Bathurst, Cape Bathurst, Bluenose-East and Bluenose-West herds are scheduled for survey, said Judy McLinton, manager of public affairs and communications for ENR. The Bathurst population size survey alone will cost about $350,000.

The controversial decision to drastically scale back the hunt is not looked upon any more favourably today and the facts about the Bathurst herd, at least according to Sangris and Taylor, are still in question.

"The local trapper who spent 40 years hunting and trapping and living with caribou doesn't have a high school degree, doesn't have a university degree, but this person has more knowledge than any of the ENR biologists," said Sangris. "I would say all the caribou biologists should be living on the land for about five months of the year, monitoring the herds, watching the herds and everything else. But they make decisions sitting behind the desk."

Apart from raising the ire of aboriginal groups and outfitters, the terms of the government's management plan, which Taylor called "political," seem to have pitted biologists, aboriginals and outfitters against each other. Sangris is adamant that aboriginals are not to blame for the reduced herd size, saying the Yellowknives Dene "have been managing caribou for thousands of years ... until other people came to our doorstep and tried to take over and they've done damage."

In a 2009 GNWT paper, however, a comparison of traditional aboriginal hunting with present day aboriginal hunting was a powerful indictment of the latter. It stated, among other things, that modern day hunters show "no awareness of conservation ethic," "kill more than is needed" and "waste meat." According to the paper, the comparison was compiled at a May 2009 workshop where several aboriginal leaders, including Walter Bayha and Joe Rabesca. spoke on the topic. The document, entitled Bathurst Caribou Herd Decline: DRAFT Technical Report December 2009, stated that modern hunting methods improved access to caribou and, together with decreased herd sizes, made the hunt less sustainable in recent years. The authors estimated that between 2006 and 2009 an average of 415 bulls were taken annually by outfitters, 100 to 200 annually by resident hunters and a "best guess" estimate of 4,000 to 5,000 cows and 1,000 to 2,000 bulls annually by aboriginal hunters, making the total average annual harvest between 4,000 to 5,000 cows and 2,000 bulls each year.

"A harvest of 5,000 cows would have been 2.4 per cent of the herd's 210,300 adult cows in 1996, but it would be 21.7 per cent of the herd's estimated 23,060 cows in June 2009," according to the technical report.

Taylor still doesn't understand why he and his fellow outfitters, who he feels were responsible for a relatively low percentage of the annual harvest, had all their tags revoked.

"The only conclusion we could come to is that we were the wrong colour," he said.

Taylor said he believes the government excluded and scapegoated the outfitters in part to appease the aboriginals, upon whose treaty right to hunt the government was then seeking to impose limitations.

Sangris points out that caribou is very much part of the traditional aboriginal diet and something that is not easily substituted for people with diabetes, for example.

"The caribou is very lean caribou and most of our membership who are diabetic can use caribou without any problem," he said. "They can't go and get a big fat steak off the store because fat tissue in beef is not good for anyone diabetic. It's just not lean meat. It's too rich. ... We're competing for our own food. We shouldn't be."

Taylor stakes no such claim but refers to the economic boon the outfitters helped bring to the North. In a territory short on economic diversity, the big game outfitting industry, composed of just over a handful of outfitters, contributed more than $4 million to the economy in 2005, according to a study commissioned by the NWT Barren-ground Caribou Outfitter Association and referenced in a 2008 GNWT report in which three biologists responded specifically to issues and questions raised by skeptical outfitters. Caribou, said Taylor, were the outfitters' "bread and butter" and the ban "has devastated everything."

Taylor said he believes the NWT's outfitting industry has suffered irreparable harm and that big game hunters will choose to go places with less bureaucracy. Hotels, restaurants, charter airlines and other businesses that profited from the outfitters' wealthy clients have also suffered, said Taylor. Though he doubts that an upswing in the Bathurst herd population would immediately lead the government to once again issue hunting tags for outfitters, he said that it would be a challenge for many of the outfitters to recover from the financial fallout they have already endured.

Taylor also recoils at the idea that he and his fellow outfitters were wasteful or careless about conservation. Caribou meat was given to various aboriginal communities and no parts were wasted, he insisted. Furthermore, unlike aboriginal hunters, the outfitters and their clients only killed bulls, Taylor said, leaving an appropriate ratio of bulls to cows to allow for the herd's continued propagation.

Taylor echoes Sangris's condemnation of government biologists as armchair overseers, performing calculations from their desks. He, too, doubts the credibility of the numbers, though the 2008 response paper co-authored by three biologists expected as much. "Declines in wildlife populations like caribou often bring hardship to the people who depend on them for subsistence or their livelihood," stated the authors in the paper's abstract. "Criticism of the evidence for a decline in wildlife abundance is not unusual."

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