A young woman from Finland who worked as a chef and waitress at a restaurant was forced to change jobs after she injured herself working in the kitchen. Having torn a muscle, she found it hard to stand for long periods on a hard floor. However feeling much better outdoors, she found her dream job as a reindeer herder.
Now, instead of carrying plates and preparing food, Janita Kenttälä, 26, spends her time reindeer sledding as a part of her tourism company in the magical snowy forest in Levi, Lappland.
It was something of a natural step for Kenttälä, who quit her job about five years ago. She was raised in a reindeer herding family—her father, along with his friends and a relative, was one of the first to start reindeer tours in Levi.
Kenttälä, who hails from a family descended from generations of reindeer herders, told The Epoch Times: “Traditionally reindeer herding families take the children when they’re really young out with the reindeer. So, you interact with animals from a really young age.”
Since her father had people from the UK visiting for day tours, Kenttälä said she grew up seeing tourists and that’s how she learned to speak English. However, she didn’t know how to write or read until she went to school.
Kenttälä always wanted to own a farm, during her childhood her family had kept all kinds of animals such as horses, sheep, and oxen. But when she was in school she realized that it wasn’t an optimal way to make money.
“I was trying to study something else to make an income,” Kenttälä said.
She graduated in tourism studies and tried the chef route, but it wasn’t truly what she wanted to do.
When Kenttälä’s horse that she had trained since it was a foal died, the then-young student couldn’t afford the expense of buying another one.
“That’s when I started looking for reindeer,” Kenttälä said. “And one day I went to visit a farm where I saw hundreds of reindeer running around, and it clicked that this is what I wanted to do.”
It seems that the kitchen accident was a stroke of fate and the catalyst for changing paths but the journey to owning a successful business was a huge challenge.
“When I started, I kind of lost half my friends and even part of my family,“ she said. ”They saw it as something crazy, that someone in their 20s wants to do this. For many people, it was something really strange and they would say ‘You’re doing something really stupid, this is going to be a mistake.’”
In the first year, she took a loan of 80,000 euros (US$85,600) and purchased all the equipment. However, two months later, the pandemic hit and she had to close down her business because there were no customers.
Initially, the bank only demanded the interest be paid but after 2021 repayments started in full even though many people still weren’t traveling to Lapland. During this challenging time, her father and her partner, Victor, who is from Spain, were a great support.
Kenttälä and Victor worked a few different jobs in order to survive and make the payments and their resilience paid off because “this season was really good.”
A large part of Kenttälä’s job involves taming reindeer to interact with people. Through observing them she has learned more about them.
Sharing some characteristics that are unique to them, Kenttälä said: “I always say that reindeer are a bit like cats. If you offer food; if you pet and stroke them, some are okay with that. But they are different personalities. Some of the reindeer are really curious, and they want to be around people. And then there are those other reindeer that would rather just go away and be by themselves.”
Reindeers have a really diverse diet and can eat about 300 different plants, including some poisonous ones.
As the season changes so does Kenttälä’s job.
Every spring the reindeer are released back into the wild where they prepare themselves for the winter season. It’s always been this way in Finland, Kenttälä said, because they don’t survive well in captivity and they need a varied diet.
“The summer is supposed to be the time when they gain weight for the winter,” Kenttälä told The Epoch Times. “Their nose is so sensitive that even though there’s one meter of snow, they can smell the food under the snow. Sometimes when people come to my place and they want to give food from their hand, if they use soap or perfumes, it might be so strong that the reindeer doesn’t want to take it, so we have to put it on the ground.”
The first time she takes a reindeer for sledding, Kenttälä usually goes by herself, to see how it pulls. Sometimes, she said, they run really fast; “even something like 50 kilometers an hour.”
Recently she said, “on a tour, we had the sun for the first time in two months. We saw the sun coming up, painting the snow pink, orange, and red. Everyone was quiet when this happened…. all you could hear was the reindeer walking.”
Kenttälä has guests from all over the world. Instead of using travel agencies and paying a large commission, Kenttälä and Victor transitioned to making 90 percent of their sales directly from their own website.
The touring season lasts from November to March and when it ends Kenttälä focuses on reindeer herding and maintenance jobs such as gathering and chopping firewood.
Reindeer are an integral part of life in Finland—as well as providing people with transportation, clothing, and blankets to insulate them from the cold, they are an important food source. While Kenttälä enjoys preparing traditional food and grew up eating reindeer meat, she sticks to baking goodies for her guests.
Kenttälä has a small herd and she thinks of them as her friends or family members.
Since she shares a really close bond with them, Kenttälä has never considered eating the reindeer she trains.
“At some point, it would be like eating your own dog, because you’re training them so much,” she said.
Reindeer are strong animals and working with them, Kenttälä says, demands a high degree of mutual respect.
“I feel like when they’ve grown really big antlers, they are very careful with me,“ she said. ”They don’t want to hurt me. It’s because I treat them with respect, and they treat me the same.”
