Ministry ends the caribou maternal pen program in the Peace
Eight years, ninety-four calves, and a herd that is still shrinking. The biologists say the pen worked; the map around it did not.
The maternal penning program in the Peace will not run a ninth season. The ministry confirmed Wednesday that the pen above the Sukunka is being decommissioned, ending an effort that guarded ninety-four calves through their first weeks over eight springs.
By its own narrow measure, the pen worked. Calf survival inside ran three times the wild rate, and the program's field crew — a mix of ministry staff and local guides who wintered feed up the mountain by snowcat — hit every animal-welfare benchmark the design set. The herd it served is smaller now than when the first fence post went in.
The arithmetic that closed it is the program's own published data: penned calves entered a landscape where the things that kill adult caribou — roads, cutblock edges, the moose-and-wolf dynamics that follow both — were unchanged. "We were topping up a bathtub with the drain open," one biologist on the project said. "You can do that for eight years on dedication. You cannot do it forever on purpose."
The ministry's statement says resources will shift to habitat measures, which is the sentence these programs always end on. The crew's last trip up the mountain is scheduled for October, to take the fence down before the snow — a task the foreman noted, without editorializing, takes one week of the eight-year effort to undo.
