Chapter 11. From Eradication Campaigns to ‘Care Protection’: Finnish Endangered Animals in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This chapter examines the human relationship with wild animals in Finland during the twentieth century. The chapter analyses three distinctive, yet somewhat overlapping, stages of human-animal relations. The first stage covers much of the first part of the century, when wild animals were perceived almost solely through the prism of their utility to humans. Game animals were considered as resources to be exploited, while predators were feared for the harm they might cause to humans and their domestic animals. As a result, many species from both categories were hunted to the brink of extinction. The second stage, around mid-century, saw the evolution of a more complex relation, when some species that were formerly hunted relentlessly were given protected status. Often these protected species were constructed as having cultural and historical significance for the Finnish people and thus being symbols of Finnishness. The third stage extends from the 1960s to the end of the century and beyond. During this stage, the protection of species and their habitats emerged as an elemental part of environmental discourse, with new labour-intensive techniques to protect wild animals. Yet, more than one tenth of Finnish animal species and half of habitats are endangered, and these trends have shown continuous deterioration.