Dole said she also supports drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, where drilling would have a small footprint that wouldn’t harm much wildlife.
"Even the caribou like to snuggle up to the pipeline," she said.
I first came upon that claim about the caribou years ago when I was working as a fact checker for a science magazine. A reader had written in about a story we had run about the Alaska pipeline and made the claim that the pipeline really wasn't a problem for the Alaskan wildlife, that the caribou liked to snuggle up against it. It was left to me to track down whether or not this was true.
So I started tracing the phrase back through news reports. It had an active life on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and in the mouths of republicans. I couldn't find any scientists saying anything similar and wondered where such a phrase could have come from.
Eventually I tracked down the wildlife biologist who had managed the Alaskan caribou herd for decades before his retirement. He had my answer: It seems the first President Bush was speaking at a fundraiser and made the claim about the caribou. He didn't have any proof. And my wildlife biologist said it was a lie. The caribou can't stand the pipeline and try not to go near it, even though the pipeline had been built so that they could cross it in places.
We never ran that reader letter (the magazine didn't run untruths). And until today, I never had a chance to expose Bush Sr's lie. Thanks for the chance to do so.
[updated to fix typo]