In Lapland, the reindeer crossing the road has an owner

Almost everyone who travels to Lapland hopes to see a reindeer, and almost everyone sees one sooner than expected: not on an excursion, but from the car, on the verge or right in the middle of the asphalt, walking slowly along the centre line with no intention of moving aside. The usual reaction is the same: brake, take out the phone and think you have just come across wild Arctic fauna.

This article explains why that impression is wrong, what system sustains an animal that looks free, and how your way of seeing the landscape changes once you understand that every reindeer in Lapland is, at the same time, an animal living on its own terms and the property of someone who knows how to recognise it.

The first clue comes well before you reach Lapland. On the road heading north, at the boundary between the municipalities of Kuhmo and Suomussalmi, in the Kainuu region, there is a yellow sign with a map of Finland, a triangle with a reindeer and a phrase in four languages: "Area of reindeer husbandry". It is the southern edge of a territory of 122,936 square kilometres, 36% of the country, within which reindeer may move and graze by law. From that sign onwards, the animal you see in the forest is not a find: it is a neighbour.

Once inside Lapland, what you see repeats itself with few variations. A lone reindeer or a small group by the roadside ditch, often in autumn, when the birches turn yellow. Animals that do not flee from the car, that look at it, that cross when they feel like it. Reindeer lying beside the car park of a visitor centre or grazing at the foot of a hotel. In a national park such as Urho Kekkonen, in September, a group of bulls with their antlers still covered in velvet stands still on top of a rise and watches you from a few dozen metres away.

That closeness is the first piece of evidence that something does not fit the idea of wild fauna. A study by Mauri Nieminen, of the Finnish game and fisheries research institute, measured the distance at which Finland's reindeer flee from a person on foot: about 68 metres on average for the semi-domesticated reindeer, against about 192 metres for the wild forest reindeer. The animal that lets you approach is not confident because it is tame: it has lived with people for generations.

Finnish has two words for what we call a reindeer in English. Poro is the reindeer with an owner, the herding animal. Peura is the wild animal: the same species, Rangifer tarandus, but with no mark and no owner. The distinction is not a technicality. Finland really does have a wild reindeer, the forest reindeer (metsäpeura), but it lives outside Lapland: around 3,000 animals split between Kainuu and the Suomenselkä area in the west-central part of the country, larger and darker than the poro, longer-legged and far more elusive. The authorities try to keep the two populations from mixing.

Inside the husbandry area, by contrast, every reindeer is a poro. The body that brings herders together, the Reindeer Herders' Association (Paliskuntain yhdistys), sums it up in one sentence: each reindeer has an owner, and ownership is marked on its ear. The national tourist board puts it another way for visitors: every animal you see in a Finnish forest belongs to a herder. And it adds a proportion that helps put it in perspective: in Lapland there are roughly as many reindeer as people.

It is worth saying carefully: semi-domesticated does not mean domesticated like a cow. The reindeer does not live in a barn, does not eat feed except in hard winters, does not let itself be ridden or led except for the few trained for the sleigh. It spends most of the year without seeing its owner. What makes it property is not daily control over the animal, but a system of recognition and allocation that works at a distance.

The ownership mark (poromerkki) is a combination of cuts along the edge of both ears. Each cut has a name: pykälä (a notch), hanka (a hook), halki (a slit), poikki (the tip cut off), reikä (a hole), linnunvarvas (a "bird's toe") and so on, up to about twenty. The mark is read in a fixed order, from the tip of the right ear downwards, and is described in drawings as well as in words. Combining cuts produces unique marks: around 12,000 are in use in Finland. A herder may hold one mark; a cooperative, two.

The mark is not an informal custom: it is registered. The Reindeer Husbandry Act of 1990 (848/1990) entrusts the Herders' Association with the official register of marks, and the decree implementing it lists the permitted cuts. A mark is approved on the proposal of the cooperative's board, entered under its holder's name and can be traced. In practice, it is a system of property titles written on the ear of an animal that will not stand still.

How is it decided who owns an animal born out on the fells? By following the mother. In June and July, around midsummer, herders gather the reindeer into fences for calf marking. The calves born in spring are released inside the fence and the herders walk the fence line noting which female each one follows; they compare notes, and once the mother's owner is confirmed, the calf receives the same mark. The work is done late at night, when the air is cooler and the animals suffer less. It is the moment of the year when the reindeer stops being an animal of the forest and becomes, officially, somebody's reindeer.

If every reindeer has an owner, why does nobody fence it in? Because the law allows it and the land demands it. Section 3 of the Reindeer Husbandry Act states that, within the husbandry area, herding may be practised irrespective of who owns or possesses the land. This is the so-called free grazing right, and herders regard it as the basis of their livelihood's profitability: the reindeer finds its food on state land, forestry company land and private land without any need for a permit estate by estate. An animal that lives on lichen scattered over hundreds of square kilometres cannot be fed in a fenced meadow.

The unit that organises that territory is the paliskunta, the herding cooperative. The area is divided into 54 of them, each responsible for the reindeer in its district and headed by a chief elected at a general meeting. Each owner belongs to only one. The word comes from the Sámi palgat, describing the restless movement of a reindeer, and the institution is older than the modern Finnish state: it was first used in Kuusamo around 1828, the Senate ordered cooperatives to be founded in 1898, the first Reindeer Husbandry Act came into force in 1932 and the current one in 1990. In the northernmost part of the area, the Sámi homeland, reindeer herding is also a central part of Sámi culture and language; elsewhere, Finnish families have practised it for generations too.

The system has its counterpart. The same section that grants free grazing requires that reindeer do not damage saplings in forest regeneration areas or cause unnecessary harm to agriculture, and the Act sets a maximum number of reindeer per cooperative, calculated on the capacity of the winter pastures. The animal's freedom, in other words, is counted, bounded and negotiated. A national park, a timber company's forest and the back garden of a house in Inari are all part of the same pasture.

What looks like a free animal is a system of ownership spread over a third of the country. There is no fence because the fence is on the ear.

If you understand the herder's year, you understand why you see reindeer where you see them. The reindeer husbandry year officially begins on 1 June and ends on 31 May. In summer, when the biting insects appear, reindeer bunch together on their own and move up to open, windy ground: that is when they are gathered for calf marking and when they are easy to see on the fell tops. Afterwards they scatter again across the summer pastures.

In autumn, during the rut, bulls keep their females tightly grouped, which makes it easier for herders to gather the herds and bring them to the fences for the sorting (erotus), which runs from late September through January. In the fence each animal is identified by its mark, entered in the owner's records, a decision is made about which ones stay as breeding stock and which go to slaughter, and the rest are treated for parasites and released. In the south and centre of the area this is done before the snow; in the north, herders often wait for the lakes to freeze so they can work with snowmobiles.

That calendar explains the scene on the road. Between October and December the herds move between seasonal pastures, herders drive them towards the fences, and the roads cut right across those routes. The reindeer you see in November by the asphalt is neither lost nor an adventurous individual: it is on its way, just like you.

To migration is added something more prosaic: salt. When roads are treated against ice and freezing rain, the salted asphalt attracts reindeer, which come to lick it. And since the animal has not learned to fear cars, it stays. According to the Herders' Association, road and rail traffic injures or kills between 4,000 and 5,000 reindeer in northern Finland every year, most of them in October, November and December, and most often at dawn and dusk. In a normal year that is more than ten a day.

This is where the reindeer's ownership stops being a curiosity and becomes something that affects you. If you hit a reindeer in Finland, the driver is not liable to pay for the animal: it is compensated by the Finnish Motor Insurers' Centre (Liikennevakuutuskeskus), a common fund that also covers accidents caused by foreign vehicles. If the owner cannot be identified from the mark, the local cooperative receives the payment. Herders often point out that the compensation falls short of the animal's real value and of the calves it will no longer have, but the principle is clear: society collectively bears the cost of the reindeer living freely on the road.

The first misunderstanding is the one that gives this article its title: taking the reindeer for wild fauna. The practical consequence is that visitors behave as if on safari, approaching for a photo or stopping the car in the middle of the road. Finnish law forbids disturbing or frightening reindeer, and in autumn, during the rut, bulls can react unpredictably. The reindeer is not dangerous because it is wild; it is a large animal, with an owner, that is best left alone.

The second misunderstanding is the opposite one: thinking that, since it has an owner, it is a farm animal you can feed. Feeding a reindeer by the roadside teaches it to expect food from people and to stay where it should not. Herders themselves recommend something simple: if you want to touch or feed a reindeer, go to a reindeer farm, where the animals are used to people. There you will also see the other sign of ownership: many carry, alongside the cut mark, a numbered plastic tag on the ear, an optional extra that the Association registers so the owner can be traced.

The third misunderstanding concerns place. Many people believe that reindeer "belong to Lapland" and that, on entering the region, they are entering its territory. In fact the husbandry area begins in Kainuu, well south of Lapland's administrative boundary, and excludes the coastal towns of Kemi and Tornio. Finland's reindeer is not an animal of a particular landscape but of a territory defined by law, whose edge is painted on a yellow sign.

And the fourth, more subtle: confusing "owned" with "not wild in any sense". That a reindeer is marked does not stop it living on lichen, migrating, giving birth out on the fells and going months without seeing anyone. Finnish reindeer herding is one of the few forms of livestock farming in which the animal keeps almost all of its original behaviour. The mark does not domesticate it; it assigns it.

Once you know that every reindeer has an owner, the Lapland landscape rearranges itself. The yellow sign in Kainuu stops being a traffic warning and becomes a property boundary. The forest you drive through is not no-man's-land: it is a pasture shared between the state, companies, private landowners and 54 cooperatives that share out the animals. The reindeer watching you from the ditch is not discovering you: it is letting you pass through a place where it already was.

What is worth understanding is this: in Lapland, the reindeer's freedom is not the absence of a system but its result. An animal can walk down the centre of a national road, sleep beside a hotel and give birth on a fell because there is a mark on its ear, an entry in an office register, a cooperative that answers for it and a fund that pays if someone hits it. When the next reindeer blocks your way, you will not have seen wild fauna. You will have seen how a centuries-old arrangement between an animal, a territory and the people who live from it actually works.

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