The holiday season in many countries means a large family dinner, and in the ‘anglosphere’ this often means eating a large turkey. In Finnish Lapland, it would be far more common for folks to sit around a large piece of reindeer (Santa’s reindeer notwithstanding). Of course, we happily live in a world where there are all kinds of dishes that can be served during the holiday season, but perhaps it is rarely wondered: what do reindeer eat at this time of year?
Well, the answer for an increasing number of reindeer is concentrated and dried pellets. With some notable exceptions, all reindeer herders in Finland feed their reindeer during the winter months. For some it is a short term response to poor winter conditions where pastures are iced over (an increasingly common occurrence). For others, such as in the more southerly parts of Lapland that have been heavily logged and ditched, feeding reindeer has been the norm for decades, as reindeer’s wintry pantry has been removed.
While the feeding of reindeer was not a focus of the CHARTER project, it came up in conversations with reindeer herders frequently, particularly after the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022. So, to look into the humble pellet, Philip Burgess and Irina Wang decided to create a StoryMap that dived into this story in a visual way, and uncover some of the stories and reasons for what is a small but growing sector for feedlot producers.
Dive in, learn more about how and where feed is made, and why herders use it, and the concerns that feeding has on reindeer behaviour and their use of the landscape and how this change in interaction between herders and reindeer is impacting an ancient interaction.
