“I feel like everything goes against reindeer husbandry”

Lars-Ola sits beside a reindeer hit by the train that crosses through their grazing lands. Photo: Anneli Kråik Jannok

Lars-Ola Jannok sits down on the couch after a long day in the reindeer pasture. They have just had reindeer separation when the reindeers are rounded up. Some are taken for slaughter, others are moved to winter grazing lands, and unmarked calves are marked with a slit in the ear.

Jannok sighs as he sits down on the couch, still dressed in his outer garments. He looks tired, and no wonder reindeer husbandry is long and strenuous work, but Jannok lives for the reindeer, and you have if you are to survive in this field, he says. He admits it's tough, but even though he has no intentions of giving up himself, he says he has thought a lot about the future of reindeer husbandry and worries for the future generations.

“It was not like this when I grew up,” he says. “Back then, it was a fun and a good time, the reindeer herds grew, and people lived on reindeer husbandry, and they don’t today. You have to look for other jobs, either you work in the mine, or you work elsewhere because reindeer husbandry does not bear all these expenses it is to be a reindeer herder today”.

We sit down in his late parent’s living room, where he grew up in Gällivare. Jannok says reindeer husbandry has changed in many ways since he was a boy with increased intrusions into land, deforestation, climate change, and the ever-growing predators. But something else has also recently been revived, the racism against Sámi.

“Being a reindeer herder today is mentally stressful, I experienced that myself last winter when I was threatened with murder,” Jannok says.

“It is not fun to walk around and be afraid, and you are afraid for the family, you are afraid for yourself, you’re afraid for the house, the cars, and everything. You just wonder every day you wake up if you have something left and to live like that every day it leaves marks,” he says.

Jannok says he is used to racism since his early childhood years where he grew up in Gällivare, a municipality, which has grown rapidly since the opening of the iron ore mines. But recently, he says he feels like the situation has escalated.

In January last year, as Jannok was releasing his reindeers along Tjautjasvägen in Gällivare, a car suddenly pulls up, and a man rolls down the window and yells,

“Drop your reindeer here, we will shoot them anyway, and we are going to shoot you too”.

“I reported it directly to the police, but after a couple of weeks, I get a letter home saying they have dropped the case,” Jannok says.

“They hadn’t done anything, nothing. Even though it was a pretty good description I gave them”.

Lars-Ola Jannok has just released some of his reindeers after the reindeer separation. Photo: Ellinor Friström

Earlier that month Jannok, found reindeers butchered along the same road and reported the incident to the police without success. He believes the police don’t care about reindeer poaching and recalls one time he called the police after having found a whole herd slaughtered, only to be told that they wouldn’t come because the priority on reindeer poaching is too low.

”We find a lot of reindeer during the winter months,” he says. “Sometimes they’ve just shot the reindeer and left, and sometimes they’ve slaughtered it and taken the best pieces”.

”Sometimes you find only skin and skulls, but there is a lot of this around Gällivare, and it is a huge problem. And you feel so powerless because we report every single reindeer that is shot, but I feel like nothing happens, there are no investigations, nothing,” he says.

Jannok feels like the discrimination and threats against Sámi people have worsened following the highly publicised ‘Girjas case’ against the Swedish state. The case was the first of its kind in which a Sámi village won the right to grant hunting and fishing rights in their village.

Jannok is not a member of Girjas Sámi village but is the chairman of the neighbouring village Báste čearru, which along with three other Sámi villages has demanded the same rights. He does not want to talk about the Girjas case for fear of reprisal but says he is worried over the future of reindeer husbandry due to the increased intrusions into land and water.

“There was more room for the reindeer before, now I feel like the reindeer has no place to be,” he says.

“It's in the way wherever it goes, there are communities, free outdoor life, forest companies who cut down all the forests, roads and railways, so there's been a lot of lands that have disappeared. And reindeer husbandry is so dependent on land. If you don't have land, the reindeer can not survive”.

Báste čearru is situated in Gällivare municipality, one of Sweden’s fastest-growing cities in the north since the discovery of iron ore in the late 17th century. At the end of the 19th century, the iron ore line was built to transport ore, stretching from the Swedish coast to the border between Sweden-Norway. The freight line has caused big issues for Báste čearru village as it crosses right through their grazing lands for about 37 miles.

“It runs over a lot of reindeer. We have a place where we have no fence of about 15 km, and it’s very worrying, sometimes you get there and the train has killed a large flock of reindeer,” Jannok says.

“Another problem we have are the roads because they salt the roads as soon as there’s some snow,” he says. “And because they salt the roads, the reindeer are drawn to the roads, and they stand and lick salt, and they don’t leave, you can’t get them away from there because they become addicted by the salt and eventually they are run over”.

Lars-Ola's wife Anneli Kråik Jannok kneels down beside a reindeer cow and a calf hit by the train. Photo: Lars-Ola Jannok

The biggest worry for Jannok, however, is the changing climate, which destroys the grazing lands. Particularly during the winter, when the reindeer live off lichen, they dig out from underneath the snow. But the more frequent alternating periods of freezing, and thaw during the winter, creates ice beneath the snow and stops the reindeer from being able to dig through to the lichen.

“It has become so against reindeer husbandry in every way, especially because it’s so rainy and this autumn-winter, is so uncertain nowadays you can never relax and feel that it will be a good winter,” Jannok says. “It will be good one day, and the next week it can be heavy rainfall, and then it destroys the bottom, so it is a very worrying development”.

When the reindeer can’t find food on their own reindeer herders are forced to spend a lot of money on emergency feeding. But the rapid climate changes also lead to an unpredictable shift in the seasons.

“Last year was a very bad winter it died quite a lot reindeer in all of Norrbotten and a very bad spring, so those calves that were born they froze to death,” he says. “And those that didn’t freeze to death we had so very few calves up in our Sámi village and neighbouring village so there were not many who survived the reindeer separation because there are so many predators up there that eat them”.

Whilst many Sámi feel that climate change is an enormous threat to reindeer husbandry, a study from last year by the Sámi Parliament of Sweden found that most feel predators pose the biggest threat to reindeer husbandry. The strain is different on each Sámi village, and Sápmi stretches across half of Sweden’s surface, but it’s clear that most of them suffer big losses due to the increase in predators during the 20th century.

“There were a lot fewer predators when I grew up,” Jannok says. “Back, then we didn’t have as big of a problem with eagles as we have now. Today, it’s crowded with eagles, golden eagles, but we also have sea eagles that come from Norway”.

“They cause extremely large calf losses for the Sámi villages, but we also have other predators that increase, wolverine, lynx, and bear, and now we have a wolf that you may have heard of, it’s not that far from our Sámi village. It’s in Girja's Sámi village, and old back I heard a wolf travels overnight seven Sámi villages so it could already be within our village”.

In 2013 the Swedish parliament decided that the Sámi should accept a loss of at most 10 % of all reindeer in each village. The number appears to be much higher, however, and according to the Sámi Parliament of Sweden, many Sámi villages loose between 30-40 % of reindeers to predators.

Birgitta Åhman, professor in reindeer husbandry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) looked at the number of reindeer slaughtered in a year. In Sweden, there are about 250,000 reindeer, and every year around 50,000 animals are taken to slaughter. According to Åhman that figure should be much higher at around 80,000 to 100,000 and believes predators are responsible for a high number of lost reindeers.

Lars-Anders Baer, lawyer and chairman of Luokta-Mávas Sámi village, believes his village has a loss of around 28 % and is critical to the inventory system currently in place for tracking predators and paying damages.

“You are compensated to some extent, but not fully. We still have problems with this system,” he says. “It has worked very badly now due to weather and wind and climate change”.

“There are two alternatives you can either increase the predator compensation or in some way reduce the damage levels to these 10 % in each village,” Baer says. “Today you don’t apply the parliament's decision which is a bit strange, that decision was made eight years ago, and nothing has happened”.

Jannok is worried about the future of reindeer husbandry and is afraid that it might not survive much longer with the mounting obstacles and poor economic viability.

“I feel like everything goes against reindeer husbandry,” he says.

“Your reindeer are hit by the train, they're hit by the car, they are poached, they die of starvation, there is so much, they become predator food, there is not much left for oneself,” he says.

“And you have to be able to live yourself as well, and it's so hard to blossom when you have that pressure”.