Common Dreams:

Alberta’s attempt to boost caribou numbers by killing wolves is an inhumane approach that fails to target the root of the problem—the extractivist industries—says a group scientists.

Explaining how the wolves came to be seen as the problem, Kaleigh Rogers writes at Vice:

See, roads and industrial development built to take advantage of Alberta’s rich natural resources has impacted the woodland habitat, in part allowing wolves to more easily gain access to the caribou herds. While the wolves aren’t to blame, they have been contributing to the diminishing caribou population and nearly wiped them out in some areas, so the government decided to introduce a systematic wolf cull to address the immediate problem.

Controversy erupted in November following the publication of an analysis in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, which, as CBC Newsreported at the time, assessed

the effect of a seven-year wolf cull in the northwestern Alberta range of the Little Smoky caribou herd — roughly 70 animals scratching out a living on land 95 per cent disturbed by forestry and energy development. Seismic lines and cutblocks from that development allow wolves deep into the undisturbed portions of the forest, adding further pressure. In an attempt to keep caribou from disappearing, Alberta began an annual cull of about 45 per cent of the wolves on that range in 2005. By 2012, 841 wolves had been poisoned or shot from helicopters.

The wolf killing managed to keep the caribou population stable, but was just buying time for the caribou, the study found. As Emma Marris wrote in the journal Nature, the caribou population did not show an increase. “Such an increase would require placing new limits on industrial development in Alberta, a conclusion that adds fuel to an ongoing debate about the ecological consequences of human activity in the boreal forest,” she wrote of the study.