In August, a lightning blast claimed the lives of more than 300 reindeer in Norway. The month before, an anthrax epidemic – which Russian officials blamed on microbes that thawed after spending decades frozen inside a reindeer corpse – sickened several indigenous people in Siberia and killed a 12-year-old boy. Reindeer died by the hundreds.

In the disease's aftermath, the regional government proposed to cull 250,000 reindeer by Christmas. Rudolph still can't catch a break.

Even the Arctic tundra has turned against the animals, so well-adapted to the clime, as the area warms at a faster rate than the rest of the globe.

In November 2013, 61,000 reindeer starved to death on Russia's Yamal Peninsula. It marked the largest regional "mortality episode" of reindeer ever recorded, as ecologists wrote in a new study in the journal Biology Letters.