cases

The boundary between wolf and dog is a key issue in many parts of the North. Hybrids have been reported in all nine European wolf populations, and even consciously cross-bred in Russia. We study this in Kainuu and Ostrobothnia in Finland, where the debate on wolves and wolf-dog hybrids is particularly acute. Laws and policies in Europe and Russia currently lack an accurate and workable definition of hybrids and a guidance on how to manage free-ranging wolf-dog hybrids. We study conflicting perspectives, with focused interviews among hunters who challenge the wolf's legal protection on the grounds of the increased wolf population, locals who fear wolf-dog hybrids for their unusual behaviour towards humans, people who keep wolf-dog hybrids as pets, representatives from the Finnish Natural Resources Institute who manage the Finnish wolf population, and conservationists who aim to keep the wolf protected and genetically pure.

We will analyse RNA from these hybrids and compare gene expressions with those of wolves and dogs, thus establishing genetic diversity and similarity between these three animal types.We will study the legal implications of whether this hybrid is classified as a wild protected animal like a wolf or as a stray dog which legally should be shot to conserve the purity of the wolf population, and whether the killing of this animal should be punished by law or recommended. These different perspectives on wolf-dog hybrids very well illustrate our project's approach to the complex social, cultural and biological constructedness of the ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ as significant ideal types.

The legal protection of the wolf in Finland makes their ancient conflict with domestic reindeer more acute than in Russia. We shall focus on the Sami area around Sallivaara Herding Cooperative. Here, as all over Lapland, predators (wolf, wolverine and bear) are protected by law and reindeer herders are allowed to kill them only in extreme situations of threat. Instead, herders have the right to state compensation for reindeer losses, in effect (as they ironically remark) being paid to raise food for predators. However, the shift from intensive to extensive herding or ranching, in which humans no longer follow the reindeer closely as they still do in most of Russia, has made it increasingly hard to prove that a reindeer was killed by a predator. In Finland, since the passing of the Reindeer Herding Bills starting in 1932 all reindeer are classified legally as domestic. Yet the shift in herding technique has allowed domestic reindeer to become behaviourally more wild in the forest. Thus, the categories of domestic and wild are now blurred in a fluid and contested reality of ferality.

We will study reindeer herders' cosmology and symbolic thinking about animal agency, changes in their relation to the wolf and other predators, the cyclical fluctuations in the new balance between tameness and ferality through the reindeer herding seasons, and the herders' quest for greater agency and their demands for a change in legal regime. We will study these complicated legal regimes concerning predators and compensation, in which the law gives greater weight to the interests of wild animals rather than of domestic animals or their owners, and the implications of this perspective for legal philosophy.

We shall deepen our understanding of both local cosmologies and genetic expression. We will study cases reindeer is significant both as an animal herded and hunted, to form a highly integrated social and ecological system. Usually, wild animals are governed by a spirit master who controls their relationship with humans, while domestic animals, particularly reindeer, are often thought to serve their human owners deliberately and consciously.

What happens in cases where people both hunt and herd animals from the same herd? Moreover, there is cross-breeding, accidentally as well as deliberately. In a case in South Greenland, we work with one reindeer herder, who holds reindeer with very few management interventions. Moreover, it is planned to introduce wild reindeer from further North to that domestic herd, where in addition to slaughtering, reindeer can also be offered for hunters. We will study how this affects local perspectives on the concepts of domestic, wild and hybrid reindeer. 

Sheep herding is widespread across the Arctic and beyond, and very diverse in the degree to which people control the movement and behaviour of sheep. In our cases we shall illustrate how fluid the border is between managing a herd of domestic sheep, making use of feral sheep, which were left behind when sheep farms ceased to exist, and thirdly wild sheep that are managed by herders in an Arctic mountain chain and hunted for meat and trophy purposes. We shall work with sheep farmers in Greenland, who have domestic sheep that stay over winter in barns and get fed, while at the same time they also eat the meat of feral sheep that roam freely in the neighbouring mountains year-round, and are harvested in the fall at the same time as the domestic sheep are slaughtered.

We shall perform RNA sampling from both of these sheep groups and analyse how their gene expressions are different between the domestic and the feral sheep. The wild sheep population case study bases on previous fieldwork in the mountains of Kharaulakh in East Siberia at the shore of the Laptev Sea, where reindeer herders have a long history of hunting snow-sheep (ovis nivicola), but recently started to cooperate with conservationists to manage the population scientifically and issue trophy hunting licences for wealthy tourists. 

The fluid categorisation of the horse between a pastoral managed and a wild animal can be best studied on the example of the Yakutian horse, which usually grazes freely over winter and forages on pastures under the snow like reindeer. Based on previous fieldwork and RNA sampling, we shall study how the human relations to the horses as well as the gene expressions differ between the seasons, and different holders of the animals. While some horses are wild almost year-round and people mainly hunt them for meat (as is the case among our field partners in the Kharaulakh Mountains), others herd and ride their horses between May and October, after which they are released to graze unmanaged. 

Banner photo by Lukas Allemann.: Camp no. 8 of the Lovozero Reindeer Herding Cooperative, Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, in 2013. This camp and herding area is now falling victim to the beginning extraction of lithium in the area by the company Nornickel.