When Ally Menzies was a child, her father made yearly moose-hunting trips to Riding Mountain National Park, about 200 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.
Moose was a familiar part of her family’s diet, said Menzies, a wildlife conservation researcher at the University of Guelph and a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation. But when she became a teenager, the moose population started to decline. First Nations and Métis people found it more and more difficult to harvest moose in the area.