TTraditional hunters vow to ignore caribou ban

CBC News - North - Traditional hunters vow to ignore caribou banTraditional hunters say they may ignore a ban imposed by the government of the Northwest Territories on caribou hunting north of Great Slave Lake.
Declining caribou herds prompted the government to ban caribou hunting in the Bathurst Caribou herd's winter range.
According to the government's count, the Bathurst herd declined from 186,000 in 2003 to just 32,000 this year.
The new restrictions are to come into effect Jan. 1, 2010.
But the ban, announced last Friday, came as a shock to people in BehchoK'o where caribou hunting is at the root of the culture and a major source of food.
John B. Zoe negotiated the Tlicho land and self-government claim and questions whether the government can legally impose a ban on caribou hunting.
"Probably not," he said. "We have an unprecedented threat that nobody knows how to deal with. So I think it's a knee-jerk reaction."

It would be useful to know what caused the decline in the first place. Could it have something to do with what the government has allowed to go on in mining or oil exploration? Is it something like what happened with the James Bay project when thousand of caribou drowned in the flooded river caused by damming? Could it be the government wants the aboriginals to pay for their (the governments mismanagement (as usual)?

I think it's just their cycle they go through,more bous born means more wolves born and then it hit's the peak and numbers decline as food becomes scarce from too many predators.
Considering the size of their habitat I think lots of caribou never even see a human let alone a rig or mine.
I've seen the Beverly and Dorothy herds as they migrated and it's something else,hundreds of thousands of caribou as far as the eye can see.
One of the guy's I worked with up north was involved in the big volunteer effort to keep those herds from drowning in the Thelon river west of Baker lake,they put up snow fence to herd them to a safer crossing as their traditional crossing was made to deep by higher then average runoff the last few years.

The natives in the north loved all the publicity they got 5 years ago from the alarmists,polar bears were drowning etc.

Now they call for civil disobediance like this,they also do it with polar bears since the quota's were cut,they call them defence killings.