The illegal shooting of wild horses is a travesty, but so is the legal capture and sale of wild horses to the horse slaughterers, an enterprise, which is sanctioned by the provincial government. Justification for this practice is based on the flimsy contention that these horses are not “wild” but merely “feral”. The dictionary defines feral as “having refered to the wild state, as from domestication”. and wild as “living in a state of nature;not tamed or domesticated’.
The free-roaming horses in the Clearwater Forest Reserve are most definitely living in the state of nature and are not tamed or domesticated. They exhibit the classic social structure of wild horses with each band having a stallion and a group of mares and this season’s foals. The stallions run their own progeny out of the herd before they reach breeding age. The fillies are picked up by another mature stallion and added to his band or by a young stallion just starting to build a band. The young stallions join together to form bachelor bands until they are mature enough to start their own band.
You need only need catch a glimpse of some of these wild horses to know that the suggestion they have descended from horses used for logging is ridiculous. Horse loggers use draft horsess, which usually weigh around 1800 to 2000 lbs. The prefered working animals are geldings, which obviously can’t reproduce.
Wild horses are small by domestic standards, even a mature stallion is unlikely to weigh more than 850 to 900 lbs. In fact, these wild horses most closely resemble the horses the Spaniards brought to North America back in the 1500’s. Those Spanish horses formed the seed group for the vast herds of wild horses, which eventually populated all of the Great Plains. I believe that our wild horses are some of the last reminants of these wild herds.
At least one of the early explorers of this area refers in his journal to the existance of wild horses in the foothills North of the Red Deer River. So there is documented evidence that wild horses have been indigenous to the area for more than two centuries. Certainly, there would have been some instances of feral horses joining the wild herds, but virtually all of the free-roaming horses currently inhabiting the Clear Water Forest were born wild.
These horses are imperiled because they have almost no legal protection. They are not covered by wildlife legislation, and the Stray Animal Act is clearly inappropriate. What is needed is specific provincial legislation which will protect wild horses on public lands and ensure that Alberta will always have wild horses. The legislation would also provide for a means of managing the population of wild horses through a selective culling and adoption program. The wild horse is symbolic of the spirit of Alberta and the preservation of wild horses would be a tremendous legacy for this province. Published with written permission from the author Robby McHenry of Innisfail
The wild horses of Alberta made the front page of the Calgary Herald today, February 11th, 2007
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=29c5c9ff-0426-4b79-a13c-532fa9cdce9e&k=5126
Left by doreen henderson on February 11th, 2007