…But the nearly century old absence of a fourth big game animal, the woodland caribou, has had some hunting groups question if the native animal could ever be reintroduced in the province. “They were here, as far as we know, since the glaciers left,” said Gerry Parker, a former officer with the Canadian Wildlife Service who studied caribou in the Canadian Arctic. “They were here thousands of years.” “But the caribou were overhunted, mainly for their antlers,” said Parker …”There is pretty strong evidence that [increase in whitetail deer populations] is one of the factors that led to the precipitous decline of the caribou,” said Stephen Clayden, a botanist at the New Brunswick museum. “A meningeal worm, it’s a parasitic nematode, or commonly called a brain worm.” “It is carried by whitetail deer,” said Clayden. “But is not lethal to them like it is to caribou.”