Norway is faced with a terrible choice of the economy over culture these days as well over a hundred migrating reindeer have been killed in the past week by passing freight trains in the north of the country.
The operator claims that its clients demand ever faster services whilst the local traditional reindeer herders blame the speed of the trains for the multiple fatalities of their animals.
Torstein Appfjell, a local Norwegian herder, said: “This is a tragedy for me and three other herders. I was on the spot night on Saturday and that was a terrible sight.”
“Reindeer are something special for us who do this. They mean almost everything to us and the animals form the basis of our existence. Such a big recess in our reindeer herd is catastrophic.”
The train operator Bane Nor (translated as Norwegian roads) explained that a warning about the reindeer on the route had failed to reach a driver due to a “technical failure”.
National Norwegian radio NRK admitted that sixty-five animals were mown down on a track on Saturday whilst already last week another 41 had died between Wednesday and Friday.
The owner of those 65 dead reindeer, Mr Ole Henrik Kappfjell, described the killings as "a senseless animal tragedy, a psychological nightmare."
Though more than 2,000 reindeer were already hit and killed along the same northern stretch of railway line between 2013 and 2016, the great number of kills in the short time span of recent incidents was "unprecedented."
Reindeer herders want railway operator Bane NOR to install a fence along the track but the latter claims there has so far been no funding for it. They do however admit that they have recently asked their trains to drive more slowly in the area.
Estimations are that about 250,000 reindeer still graze in Norway.
Source:
http://www.dw.com/en/freight-trains-massacre-scores-of-norwegian-reindeer/a-41545856
Damn that is sad.