The Joint Arctic Weather Stations by Daniel Heidt;P. Whitney Lackenbauer;

Author:Daniel Heidt;P. Whitney Lackenbauer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2022-04-06T15:06:44+00:00

Animals

In addition to working and living alongside their comrades, JAWS personnel interacted with nearby wildlife. Animals were sources of amusement, stress, and potential danger. Huskies, for example, were an integral part of JAWS life. Originally, planners in Washington and Ottawa had assumed that dogs would be unnecessary in the age of mechanization. The early polar bear mauling at Resolute served as a poignant reminder of why Inuit and early explorers relied on dogs as a form of “early warning” and protection against these marauding predators.49 An original batch of twenty-five huskies from the Canadian War Assets Corporation were despatched to the stations to warn personnel of approaching wolves or polar bears and to provide companionship.50 For most personnel, the dogs were welcome playmates and key distractions during the dark period,51 and a few individuals trained station dogs to pull sledges.52 During the Christmas airdrop, the dogs (raised above the treeline) also amused station crews by becoming “mighty interested” in the evergreen trees, “having never seen one before.”53 Newborn puppies were an especially “great morale lifter for the gang.”54

With no check other than disease to control their numbers, the dog population at each station grew rapidly, and it only took a few years for the dog populations to strain station food supplies. In 1952, the Canadian Department of Resources and Development instructed Resolute to destroy all but five of its dogs, and for the satellite stations to reduce their populations to two animals. Resolute’s crew appears to have followed the instruction, and Mould Bay’s personnel shot their oldest dog but refused to cull its remaining four animals. Meanwhile, Isachsen ExO George Toney planned to take one of the five dogs home, but his crew and that at Eureka refused to reduce their remaining populations, which stood at four and six respectively. Rae, recognizing the crews’ fondness for their dogs, recommended that no further instructions be issued “unless a law is passed limiting the dogs at each station to a specific number, and the RCMP is authorized to enforce the law.”55

Instead, the dog population continued to expand. In 1953, Mould Bay housed five full-grown huskies and a litter of seven pups. NWT Commissioner H.A. Young consequently encouraged DoT’s Controller of Meteorological Services, Andrew Thomson, to again instruct the OICs to keep in check their stations’ dog populations after speculating that the animals might harm nearby ptarmigan nests or caribou herds, and expressing concern about a report of the dogs harassing muskox herds and killing a calf.56 These concerns about wildlife, in addition to the problem of feeding so many animals, led the Canadian Department of Resources and Development to instruct each satellite station to destroy all but two male dogs in late December 1953. The following March, men at Eureka sent a telegram “request[ing] permission to keep dog population at a permanent level of three males and one female in interests of morale and safety of personnel. Guarantee that this level will be kept at station by personnel without any assistance from outside executioner.

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