Reindeer Blog

(Pic-Philip Burgess). With the coming of summer and the migration of reindeer from Finnmarks’s interior to the coast, the local media has lately been filled with stories about the reinplagen. This translates as ‘reindeer plague’, a disease which sounds deadly, but so far, only reindeer have died as a result. It relates to reindeer grazing in urban and agricultural areas [...]

(Pic - Philip Burgess, Reindeer in downtown Hammerfest) A media fury has erupted in Finnmark surrounding comments by a parliamentary representative Olav Gunnar Ballo who claimed that reindeer herders did not have the right to live and that reindeer husbandry was acting as a brake to development and that as a livelihood ‘it was just [...]

(Pic: Vartland) While many people would love to have reindeer gambolling through their village, it has long been a bone of contention in Hammerfest. Each summer, the reindeer migrate from Kautokeino /Guovdageaidnu in inner Finnmark to the island of Kvaloya, where Hammerfest is. Residents are tired of their flower beds being munched by reindeer and [...]