Over the last decade, the Help Alberta Wildies Society has collected tens of thousands of hours of footage of individual horses. In 2022, Glover captured a video of a grizzly in hot pursuit of seven horses, which he posted to prove that the horses have natural predators. The management framework describes the dynamics between horses, ungulates and natural predators as complex and not fully understood.
It’s in this spirit of witness that Glover also tries to keep an eye on the horse population numbers the province posts following aerial surveys of its six equine management zones. The province’s most recent numbers show a minimum count of just over 700 horses in 2015, with large increases in 2018 and 2019, before the population settled to about 1,400 horses in 2023.
“The truth is [the province] doesn’t know how many horses are out here because they never fly the same flight path or distance two years in a row,” says Glover. “When you only fly a couple of miles this year, and then five times further next year, and you tell the planes where you think they should fly, the numbers are easily skewed.”
The province contests this criticism. In a statement to Canadian Geographic, an Alberta Forestry and Parks spokesperson wrote, “Although portions of the route flown each year may vary due to flying conditions or logistics such as refuelling sites, the minimum counts reflect all observed horses in each zone and provide an accurate baseline of the minimum population.”
In 2023, based on its own survey data, the province set population thresholds for each of the equine management zones as part of its management framework: green is acceptable, yellow is concerning, and red is unacceptable. In the green zone, horses can go where they please, as long as they don’t make nuisances of themselves with landowners. If the population creeps higher into the yellow zone, horse populations can be managed through capture and adoption or contraception. The Wild Horses of Alberta Society does some of this work; as a holder of one of the trapping licences in the province, it has captured, gentled and adopted out around 160 horses over its more than 20-year history. In the red zone, the management framework indicates other measures can be considered, including euthanasia. The management framework puts two equine management zones in the green zone and three in the yellow zone; one was not surveyed. The Sundre zone, estimated at 969 horses in 2023, was 31 individuals shy of the red zone.
Glover questions the data used to set thresholds for these zones. “Usually when these kinds of management plans are released,” he says, “it’s connected to carrying capacity of an ecosystem. But there isn’t a lot of forage data. They do it all from satellite.” In other words, he thinks the province needs to gather more field survey data, rather than relying on remote sensing.
In this war over grass, the province’s notion that horses are responsible for overgrazed rangeland may have holes. In 2022, ecologist Paul Boyce showed data in his doctoral thesis collected through GPS collars and camera traps that indicated horses may avoid areas where cattle graze.
For his part, Glover says his videos show grass “a foot tall and abundant” prior to cattle being released to graze in June. By the time cattle are rounded up in October, “it looks like a pool table.”