The Legault government announced Thursday that the last Charlevoix caribou have been penned. This is the second herd of cervids taken into captivity, after suffering a major decline, due to the degradation of their forest habitat.
“This operation went as planned, and 16 caribou were captured and penned, i.e. 12 adults (3 males, 9 females) and 4 fawns,” announced the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks. (MFFP), by press release.
However, the department cannot confirm whether all the caribou, which would be between 17 and 20, have been captured. “We can consider that almost the entire herd is now in the protective enclosure”, simply indicated the MFFP.
“Although still in a period of acclimatization, the caribou are doing well. Specialized personnel are on site at all times to ensure that the caribou continue to adapt well to this new protection environment,” the statement said.
The ministry built a 20-hectare enclosure, or 0.2 km2, in order to place the last remaining caribou in Parc national des Grands-Jardins. A capture pen system had also been installed to try to round up the animals, which are known to be fearful, before injecting them with a sedative and transporting them to the destination pen. We hoped to be able to proceed quickly, in order to “limit the stress” of the animals.
Gaspésie and Val-d’Or
The MFFP also plans to capture the pregnant females of the last 32 to 36 Gaspésie caribou. The objective is to protect the fawns during their first months of life, to prevent them from being killed by predators. They move more easily thanks to the forest paths, or else frequent the areas where felling has taken place. The deer will be captured with a “net launcher aboard a helicopter”, or “on the ground using a tranquilizer gun”, specifies the MFFP.
As for the last 7 Val-d’Or caribou, which were placed in captivity in 2020, their enclosure was enlarged to reach an area of 0.15 km2.
The government does not know how long the caribou could be kept in captivity. The enclosures were built to be “permanent”, in a context where keeping these animals on the verge of extinction “could last a long time”. The MFFP experts recognize, however, that animals kept in long-term captivity, but also the young that could be born in enclosures, risk losing the natural reflexes that allow them to avoid predators and find their food.
In addition, the Legault government has postponed the presentation of a strategy for the protection of caribou populations that still live in the wild. When announcing the creation of protected areas to achieve the objectives of protecting the territory of Quebec, at the end of 2020, the government abandoned about ten projects that would have made it possible to better protect the habitat of the species. All of these territories were in regions where there is also potential for logging.