CONSERVATION. To save caribou, Alberta wants to fence them in.

T he Little Smoky caribou herd of western Alberta province is among the most imperiled in Canada, its few dozen animals threatened by oil and gas development, logging, and hungry wolves. Soon, the herd could also become a high-profile test case for a controversial plan to save some of Canada’s woodland caribou from extinction: herding them into pens enclosing 100 square kilometers or more and ringed with electric fences, and killing or removing every predator inside. The massive, predator-free pen proposed for the Little Smoky animals last month by Alberta’s government is “a Noah’s Ark strategy, and it’s desperate. But these are desperate times,” says Mark Hebblewhite, a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana, Missoula. But some caribou advocates are skeptical that the expensive pens will work. They also fear that the strategy, which the energy industry has helped fund, will undermine efforts to curb habitat destruction, the main cause of caribou decline. The thinking is that “if industry is willing to invest in these sorts of activities, then you give them license to trash the rest of the boreal forest,” says biologist Chris Johnson of the University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, in Canada. The woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus) inhabits a vast swath of northern Canada, from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador. But the modern era hasn’t been kind to the gentle, reclusive creatures, which sport distinctive upsweeping antlers. The leveling of old growth forests through logging, road building, and seismic mapping of oil and gas deposits has created habitat more suitable to moose and deer. Those animals compete with caribou and have attracted wolves that also hunt caribou when the chance arises. Of 51 herds of boreal caribou, a type of woodland caribou that includes the Little Smoky, just 14 are self-sustaining, according to a 2012 federal report. The Little Smoky herd’s roughly 80 animals is well below historic levels; one study estimated the herd shrank by 35% just from 2000 to 2006. To protect caribou populations, officials in Alberta and elsewhere have launched wolf killing operations, which have drawn