Reindeer?

According to today's Guardian, some 5,000 herders in the north of Sweden are having trouble making a living out of 250,000 reindeer, in part because climate change is doing bad things to the land on which they graze. Herding which is legally restricted to Samis, a people who once had the run of a lot of what is now Scandinavia, before the current inhabitants arrived. Maybe 100,000 of them altogether, making use of no less than 10 endangered languages, relations but not talking to each other.

It occurs to me that a sensible response might be to wind down the number of reindeer, thus reducing the stress on what is very likely a very fragile ecosystem. No doubt the herders would complain, but buying them off might be a lot cheaper than making alternative arrangements for all those reindeer.

There is also the issue that ruminants generally are major contributors to global warming because of all the methane generated in their complicated stomachs, so keeping large numbers of them in marginal conditions is, perhaps, a luxury we can no longer afford. Although that said, reference 1 suggests that reindeer are not as bad as cows in this regard.

I might also say that a quick peek at the Internet has thrown up a variety of numbers for both herders and herded, so, if one cares, a bit of homework might be called for. Can we trust the Guardian to have done theirs?

Reference 1: Rumen and Cecum Microbiomes in Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) Are Changed in Response to a Lichen Diet and May Affect Enteric Methane Emissions - Alejandro Salgado-Flores, Live H. Hagen, Suzanne L. Ishaq, Mirzaman Zamanzadeh, André-Denis G. Wright, Phillip B. Pope, Monica A. Sundset - 2016.

Reference 2: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155213. A source for reference 1.