Big Reindeer Herds

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 6519, 7 April 1931, Page 2

Big Reindeer Herds

MILLION IN ALASKA. FOOD AND DRESS FOE ESKIMO. Forty years ago Dr. Sheldon, acting for the United States Government, took a small herd of reindeer and a few Lajjp herders to Alaska. The animals there now number a million. The Government of Canada has a herd, which has been on the hoof for two years, travelling overland from Alaska to the Mackenzie delta, in charge of two Greenland Danes, the Porsild brothers.

The reindeer is domestic cousin to the caribou. Unlike him, he can be controlled. There is no natural order or sequence about the movements or migration of the caribou. • Vast herds, without leaders or organisation, wander indiscriminately across the Arctic tundra, from Hudson Bay to Alaska and back again. The Government, determined to provide an adequate food and clothing supply for the Eskimo is transplanting the reindeer. Mr. Kalph Lomen, pioneer of the industry in Alaska, says there is room in the northern tundra of Canada for 12,000,000 reindeer.

Keindeer meat, nourishing as beef, tender as lamb, is now a regular article of diet in the hotels and'restaurants of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. Carcases dress about 1501 b., and have a value, with by-products, of about £6. Skins provide Eskimos with clothing and are converted by United States manufacturers into gloves, moccasins and other leather goods. Knifo handles and novelties are made from the horns. The hair, extremely buoyant, makes excellent filling for lifebelts. The reindeer is also a dairy purposes animal. In Labrador, where there are a small number, Sir Bichard Grenfell says: “The fresh milk of the does has supplied us with what is a real vital necessity, and one obtainable in Labrador in no other way, while the excellent and easily made cheeses afford a means of storing nutriment in a palatable and assimilable form without any outlay for a preserving plant.”