Fresh research suggests western Canada’s once-dwindling caribou numbers are finally growing — the biggest reason for the rebound is the slaughter of hundreds of wolves, a policy that will likely have to go on for decades. “If we don’t shoot wolves, given the state of the habitat that industry and government have allowed, we will lose caribou,” said Clayton Lamb, one of 34 co-authors of a newly published study. Caribou require undisturbed stretches of hard-to-reach old-growth boreal forest. Those same forests tend to be logged or drilled, creating roads and cutlines that invite in deer and moose — along with the wolves. Between 1991 and 2023, caribou populations dropped by half. More than a third of the herds disappeared. …The paper suggests caribou numbers have risen by 52 per cent since about 2020 compared with what they would have occurred if nothing had been done. There are now 4,500 in the two provinces, about 1,500 more than there would have been.

Additional coverage in the Guardian, by Leyland Cecco: ‘If we don’t shoot wolves, we will lose caribou’: the dilemma of saving endangered deer