The majority of caribou herds are under pressure not only in the Northwest Territories but we’ve seen that to the east, as well, with the George River and Leaf River herds and some of the herds farther to the west. The one herd that has been doing well, the Porcupine, they have the benefit of, I think, a very, very good management plan that took about seven years to agree to. They think the Bluenose-East plan is going to hopefully hit that standard as well. The Bathurst Management Plan is still somewhere in the future. Unfortunately, the complex area, unsettled claims combined with some settled claims has made it very problematic, but it’s a challenge for us. The Bathurst mobile zone, we believe, is a good solution in terms of protecting the remnants of the Bathurst herd, and that’s done based on the collars that we have, over a dozen collars, and regular flights to track where the herd is located.
When it comes to the Bluenose, there has been a ratio, in terms of bulls and cows. I fully appreciate and agree with the Member that cow caribou are very, very critical and we still have a penchant in the Northwest Territories for hunting cows. We can show very clearly in 1986 when the Bathurst was about 440,000 animals. At the same time as they put the road north into the range of the Bathurst, the numbers started to drop. So today we have about 15,000 animals. We’ve dropped over 400,000, 425,000 animals and we were harvesting roughly 15,000 animals a year. The majority of that, by far and away, at the most there was probably 3,000 at the absolute best time for resident and commercial harvest, the rest was the Aboriginal harvest and a lot of them were cows.
It has put enormous pressure on the herd and it has taken 28 years to get to this point. We’ve had some restrictions in effect for five years, and I’ve heard many comments by folks saying, “It’s been five years. How come there’s no recovery yet?” It’s because of the extent of the pressure on the herds. It’s taken 28 years to get down to 15,000 and it’s probably going to take that long to recover.
On the Bluenose-East side, we’re looking at allocation. I’ll get the deputy to speak to the bull-cow ratio. We’re pushing and have monitors out and staff out to make sure, because we’ve pretty well hit the cow harvesting number. The pressure now is on everybody to move on to the bulls with the tags that we have left, but I’ll ask the deputy to speak in more detail on that particular issue. Thank you.