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World’s largest reindeer herd targeted by poachers for antler velvet

World’s largest reindeer herd targeted by poachers for antler velvet

World’s largest reindeer herd targeted by poachers for antler velvet
Aug 13, 2020 2 mins, 43 secs

Their wild cousins on the Taymyr peninsula, to the west, undertake a yearly migration of up to 1,800 miles.

The story of what actually befell these reindeer on the Taymyr Peninsula, in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region, however, was far more grisly.

(The peninsula’s name is believed to come from a phrase used by the indigenous Nganasan meaning “land of reindeer tracks.”) On their yearly migration of up to 1,800 miles, the reindeer go south in the autumn and spend the winter in more forested areas in the Evenkiya district and Yakutia region.

Velvet antlers are imported from Russia to meet growing demand for use in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a variety of ailments.

By 2016, up to 50,000 reindeer were being killed illicitly every year, according to Leonid Kolpaschikov, head scientist at Nature Reserves of Taymyr, a grouping of protected areas around the peninsula.

To this day, more than 10,000 people in Russia lead herds of semi-domesticated reindeer on their annual migration to the Arctic Ocean.

Indigenous people in Alaska, Canada, and parts of Russia—including most of the 800 Nganasan on the Taymyr Peninsula—hunt wild reindeer.

A 2018 study found that the worldwide population of wild reindeer and caribou fell from 4.7 million to 2.1 million during the previous two decades, at least in part because of climate change.

Rivers are now thawing earlier in Taymyr, and more calves are drowning or dying of fatigue as they struggle to swim across them during the spring migration, says Vladimir Krever, the biodiversity program leader with World Wildlife Fund Russia.

The most immediate threat to the Taymyr reindeer, though, is large-scale hunting, both legal and illegal, for their meat and fur and poaching for velvet antlers.

Poachers target reindeer as their new antlers are growing in, when they're covered in a tender velvet of tissue and blood vessels.

And, says Alexander Korobkin, head of Krasnoyarsk’s wildlife department, surviving males without their antlers lose their libido and ability to joust with other bucks to win mates, precluding them from the autumn rut.

According to Kolpaschikov, the crowded river crossings had become danger zones by 2016, when some 22 tons of antlers were hacked off the heads of reindeer fording the Khatanga and Kheta Rivers.

Days later, the Krasnoyarsk regional government approved a five-year ban on cutting velvet antlers from live wild reindeer.

According to Yeiko Serotetto, a reindeer herder on the Yamal Peninsula, west of Taymyr, Russia has no such regulations.

Some conservationists say that makes it easier to “greenwash” wild reindeer antlers: The availability of legal animal products provides cover for the illegal sale and export of wild ones, which consumers often believe are more potent.

A growing amount of velvet antlers are being taken legally from privately owned reindeer in Russia, where the practice is unregulated.

“If you ask traders where they get the [antlers] from,” says Pei Su, founder of ACTAsia, an animal rights group based in the United Kingdom, they say they’re from wild reindeer “because it's a much better price.

As Russia tries to stem the wild antler trade, hunting of wild reindeer continues—and not all of it is lawful.

In 2019, permits were issued allowing for a total of 41,500 reindeer to be hunted in the Taymyr and Evenkiya districts.

Poverty is entrenched in the places where the Taymyr herd winters, and the “easy money that you can make” from the sale of reindeer products has led some local people to kill more reindeer than their limit, Korobkin says.

Rosneft spokesperson Timur Valeyev told National Geographic that an environmental impact assessment is being done for the drilling fields north of Khatanga, and after public hearings, “measures will be developed to avoid interference in reindeer activities.” There is a “very high likelihood” that these will include raising pipelines in certain areas so reindeer can pass under them, as was done at the Vankor field on the western edge of Taymyr, Valeyev said

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