A room full of research scientists is not necessarily the place you’d expect controversy and heated debate, but the opening session of the North American Caribou Workshop provided both on Monday morning (April 24).

The hot topic was the national recovery plan for woodland caribou and while the speakers kept their comments civil and focused on the caribou, the course of action proposed by one University of Alberta professor had some in the room hot under the (radio) collar.

Stan Boutin, a respected expert on woodland caribou populations in Northern Alberta, was critical of the approach outlined in the draft recovery plan, saying that an effort to conserve all caribou populations was doomed to failure.

“Some of the herds will have to be turfed,” he said. “They will have to be allowed to go extinct.”

Boutin was speaking of the small herds of caribou under threat from rapidly expanding industrial development. He said that no matter how much effort and investment was made, these herds would be unlikely to recover to sustainable levels. Instead, the best use of the limited resources available for recovery would be to focus on the larger herds that are currently stable.

“These larger herds don’t receive the attention until they become a problem later,” he said. “We need to conserve where success is likely.”

Predictably, even the suggestion of such an approach was not popular with environmental NGOs in the room. Brian Horesji of the Speak Up for Wildlife Foundation pronounced himself angry and appalled.

“I hope I’m not the only one angry,” he said to the crowded conference room. “I’m absolutely appalled and I think it’s inappropriate that we would manage a population to extinction, and I don’t think the Canadian people would stand for it.”

Rather than allowing industry representatives and wildlife managers to decide the best strategy for caribou management, Horesji argued that the direction should come from the public at large.

“The vision needs to come from the people,” he said. “We’re going to have to get a lot of people involved because I don’t feel very good about this.”

Horesji’s reservations were echoed by Helene Walsh of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). Her organization has been very active in attempting to ensure protected habitat for the Little Smokey caribou herd, and said that stepping back from conservation efforts in some areas would be giving industry a free hand.

“I’m not willing to let industry off the hook and say, oh well, you screwed that one up pretty badly so it can just go away,” she said. “We need protected areas — it’s unconsionable that the entire landscape is managed for industry and we are leaving no protected areas.”

Both Walsh and Horesji cited massive public support for the conservation and recovery of caribou populations.

“The people don’t want to see species going extinct, and they don’t want populations to go extinct,” Walsh said. While Boutin acknowledged that there was broad support for conservation in general, he claimed that with more complete information, the public might be singing a different tune.

“If you included some detail about the trade-off between caribou and some of the growth that’s happening, I don’t think people would be as supportive,” he said. “I agree that these decisions are the people’s to make, but they need to make these choices with more information.”

The woodland caribou weren’t the only species to be targeted by a prominent expert on the first day of the conference. Tom Bergerud, renowned as one of the most important caribou biologists of the last half century, argued that the only way to ensure the species survival was to begin an aggressive campaign of wolf culling.

“The common statement that habitat causes caribou decline... is a platitude that has become trite,” he said. “It allows us to avoid wolf control.”

Based on a lifetime of research, primarily in Ontario and Quebec, Bergerud argued that in locations where wolf populations were leading to reduced caribou numbers, the predators should be eliminated.

“You need to identify populations and local areas that will support this,” he advised the scientists and wildlife planners in attendance.

A wolf cull this winter in the Little Smokey region was condemned by environmental groups, while the recovery plan for Jasper National Park caribou explicitly disavowed active control of wolf populations.