Wildlife

The politics of wild: where do Alberta’s wild horses belong?

Free-roaming horses have existed in Alberta for hundreds of years. Some say they’re a nuisance, while others believe they have their own place in the landscape. In the end, who gets to decide the horses’ fate?

wild horses in the rocky mountain foothills
Wild bachelor stallions spar in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Sundre, Alta. (Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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“Just keep talking to them as you walk.”

Darrell Glover stands quietly in jeans and a ball cap a few paces behind me in a copse of conifers he calls the Winter Barn. It’s not really a barn; just a place where he’s cleared out the lowest branches, laid a few salt blocks and put up some trail cameras.

We’ve been gone a couple of hours in his Polaris Ranger side-by-side, bumping over rough tracks through cutover forest on Crown land southwest of Sundre, Alta. This is the iconic eastern slopes area of the Rockies: monochrome rows of mountains disappearing over the horizon and silvery rivers meandering through dense forests of spruce and pine. It’s grizzly and cougar country. And it’s home to Alberta’s largest population of free-roaming horses. I haven’t seen any since I grew up about 100 kilometres east of here, and I asked Glover, president of the Help Alberta Wildies Society, if he could take me to see some. He told me to pack a lunch and meet him early.

Now, three horses in shaggy winter coats stand silently at the edge of the trees, eyeing me, puffs of breath flash-frozen in the filtered light, ears pointed toward us. They are alert but calm. Glover chatters to them in a low, reassuring voice as we step forward slowly, stopping about 10 metres away when they begin to shift their weight on their hooves, a sign that they’re feeling a little wary. “They don’t know who you are, but they know me.”

A band of wild horses running in Alberta
Alberta wildies form close-knit family bands with one dominant stallion, mares and foals. (Photo: Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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Darrell Glover in his Polaris Ranger
Darrell Glover in his Polaris Ranger on the way to monitor wild horses. (Photo: Monica Kidd/Can Geo)
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To the uninitiated like me, these horses are wild. Nobody owns them. They have no bridle, no brand. They forage for food and run from predators. In that sense, they have more in common with moose and deer than the domesticated pintos and quarter horses pawing in their stalls on neighbouring ranches. 

Since the beginning of our time, humans have had a relationship with horses. They’ve helped us build civilizations, working their way into economies, cultures, politics and psyches. Around 3.6 million years ago, in what paleoanthropologists think could be one of the cradles of humanity, now modern-day Tanzania, preserved footprints in volcanic ash show that early humans and horses travelled the same pathways. In the Bronze Age, around 5,500 years ago, humans kept horses for meat and milk. And a recent study of 5,000-year-old skeletons in southeastern Europe shows they probably rode them, too. In North America, horses have been central to many Indigenous cultures since the beginning of human memory. And they have remained deeply engrained in society here. In Alberta, look no further than the number of horse ranches and the staying power of cowboy culture, still going strong after a century. 

But in the same province, casting roughly 1,400 free-roaming horses as wild is still contentious. Since the 1920s, the province has rounded up horses that have been perceived as impacting the landscape. In 1993, it moved them under the Stray Animals Act, characterizing them as the feral descendants of work animals abandoned by ranchers, loggers, miners and hunters about a century ago. These days, the province’s main concern is the war over grass: the grazing pressure horses put on rangelands used for cattle grazing (the cattle industry in Alberta is worth more than $5 billion per year). The Alberta Wilderness Association goes even further, calling them an invasive species that can harm native wildlife populations.

Since the beginning of our time, humans have had a relationship with horses.

There seems to be little overlap between these camps of wild versus stray. But the question of what we should call these ownerless, free-roaming horses is not just a semantic one. It reflects how much right we feel they have to the land, and in Alberta, that’s where things can get murky. 

Large-scale horse roundups by settlers happened as far back as the early 1900s, with some free-roaming horses sent overseas to be used in the Boer War and Second World War. After 1993, the Stray Animals Act allowed licensed trappers to remove nuisance animals — horses that interfered with domestic horse herds or were thought to be overgrazing — which could then be auctioned off to join domesticated herds or be euthanized. As part of the act, the province established a horse capture area where trappers were allowed to operate. Running between the mountains and the highway known as the Cowboy Trail, from south of Calgary nearly north to Edmonton, this area is divided into six equine management zones. Half of all known wild horses live here in the Sundre zone. 

But even after those regulations were established, tensions could still run high. Over the years, the RCMP has investigated dozens of unauthorized horse killings. In an attempt at civil discussion, the province established a feral horse advisory committee in 2013, consisting of representatives from government, industry, conservation groups, the Îyârhe Nakoda, universities and groups that advocate for free-roaming horses. The committee was meant to steer the province away from roundups, during which dozens of animals at a time could be roped or penned to be removed from the landscape, and toward population management, including injecting wild mares with a contraceptive drug; licences would still be issued to horse trappers to take animals for adoption if in good health or to euthanize them if sick or injured.

But then, in the fall of 2023, the province pivoted again and released its first-ever feral horse management framework, which includes a population threshold where euthanasia will be considered “as a last resort when all other options have been explored and are not viable as a means to lower the populations.” Some worry this means culls may be back on the table. 

A map showing the Alberta wild horse management zones
Map: Chris Brackley/Can Geo; Data: Alberta wild horses population and flight path data: Alberta Forestry and Parks, Government of Alberta - Range Conservation and Stewardship, Lands Operations Division.
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A black wild horse in Alberta
A wild horse along the Red Deer River, Alta. (Photo: Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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Belonging is a tangly question. Wild horses can be found in pockets all across North America. In Canada, a few dozen horses are thought to live in the wild in Yukon, while British Columbia has a population of close to 1,000 wild horses in the Chilcotin, most of which have been protected since 1989 by the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation on the ?Elegesi Qayus Wild Horse Preserve. In 2009, Saskatchewan granted formal protection to a small population of ponies living in the Bronson Forest about 100 kilometres northeast of Lloydminster. Sable Island, a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia, is home to a population of 450 to 500 horses initially introduced in the 1700s. Parks Canada, which assumed responsibility for the island in 2013, considers the horses “naturalized” and neither protects them from disturbance nor tends to them when they’re sick or ill. The island of Miquelon, a French self-governing territory off the south coast of Newfoundland, has a free-roaming horse population thought to number just under 200. In the United States, about 60,000 mustangs have been federally protected as heritage animals by the Bureau of Land Management since 1971, though this protection doesn’t always spare them conflict with ranchers and rangeland managers.

But just because something is present doesn’t mean it belongs, and people on both sides of the wild-versus-stray debate quickly look to provenance for ammunition. Western methods of inquiry have it that horses evolved on the North American plains 55 million years ago and are thought to have gone extinct here at the end of the last Pleistocene ice age around 10,000 years ago. The historical record pegs the reintroduction of horses to North America by European colonizers to the 16th century. Recent genetic studies seem to support the idea that present day free-roaming horses in the eastern slopes have largely descended from post-contact draft breeds, fitting the Alberta government’s narrative that the horses were released by 19th-century loggers and miners. The story is similar across the border in central B.C., where biologists working with the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation found that the ?Elegesi Qayus wild horses, genetically, were largely heavy horse breeds, but with a surprising signal of Siberia Yakut, which the researchers hypothesize came from Russian fur traders working on the coast. 

“Horses left on their own know how to graze. Mine do. I don’t baby them.”

But genetics don’t tell the whole story. Corleigh Powderface is an Îyârhe Nakoda knowledge keeper. A forensic anthropologist and an Indigenous traditional historian, she comes from a family of horse people south of Sundre, near Mînî Thnî on the Îyârhe Nakoda reserve. She laughs at the notion that Alberta’s free-roaming horses are somehow the leavings of human activity. Sitting together at a picnic table in Calgary, she offers me her teaching.

“The story I understand from the Elders,” Powderface says, “is that the Creator made four sacred spirit horses and taught them to live on land and in water. Every solstice and equinox, the horses would come up out of the water of Upper Kananaskis Lake and come onto land to breathe the air and eat the grass. There was a magnificent black stallion, a magnificent white stallion, a red stallion and a multicoloured one. Three cousins tried to capture those stallions, but the horses just went back into the lake and disappeared. 

“What they didn’t know was that there was a young girl in the trees, watching them. Every day she would come to the shore of the lake and give thanks to the Creator for having shown her his horses. On the fall equinox, the multicoloured one came to her, walked around her clockwise, the way the Earth revolves around the Sun, and then went back into the water. The next night, the spirit of Grandfather Horse came to her and led her to a valley full of horses. As she went down the hill, she slowly transformed into one and she stayed with them. So that is the connection between people and horses. We were both created during genesis. We used to migrate along the mountains, from Yellowstone up to Athabasca, carrying tipis and hides. Horses carry us when we’re tired.”

When Powderface returned home to Alberta after working in B.C., she found she had inherited her family’s deep connection to horses. Her father, Sykes Powderface, called her a horse whisperer. She began establishing her own herd of pintos, and when both her parents died in 2022, she inherited the family ranch.

She feels some sympathy for other ranchers who say the horses make nuisances of themselves by barging onto private property. But, she says, we are encroaching on their land, so it’s not the horses’ fault when they breach human-made barriers. 

“You have to walk your fence and fix places where it’s broken. You can’t blame a wild horse for coming through a broken fence.”

As for the question of what is overgrazing rangeland, horses or the cattle, Powderface knows where she stands. 

“Horses left on their own know how to graze. Mine do. I don’t baby them.”

Corleigh Powderface touching her paint horse
Corleigh Powderface with a paint horse on her family ranch. (Photo: aAron Munson / Big Cedar Films)
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Graham Overguard pets his cow
Graham Overguard on his ranch in Sundre, Alta. (Photo: Monica Kidd/Can Geo)
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Darrell Glover’s first encounter with a wild horse was in 2014. He had domestic horses on his ranch near Olds, Alta., so when friends of his came across a stranded foal while out snowshoeing one January afternoon, they called Glover for help. He came with his stock trailer and found a five-month-old colt that had been abandoned by its band. Glover took it home, where it became known as Kai. 

“They’re the most amazing animals,” Glover says. “They have a totally different character than domestics. They are a very trusting animal, and they’ve got survival skills built into them right through their genes.”

Glover, a private pilot, went up in a plane the very next day to see what other horses he could find. He spotted an area in the Williams Creek valley cleared of snow — a suspected capture site. Soon after landing, Glover called the province. “The man in charge told me their plan was to totally eradicate the wild horses from the foothills,” Glover says. “That was their agenda.” 

That made Glover mad. And when Glover gets mad, he gets busy. 

He posted his information to Facebook, and within a couple of weeks a group of people had pitched tents near the trap in the bitter cold to protest the capture. The RCMP warned Glover to keep his distance: a nearby outfitter had a licence to capture 196 animals and was doing nothing illegal. On February 25, Glover and others were arrested for mischief and spent a day in custody. Charges were eventually dropped, but Glover had to promise he would stay outside a one-mile perimeter of the capture site. 

That year he formed the Help Alberta Wildies Society, and he has continued to protest the province’s approach to free-roaming horses ever since.

Now he’s out here in the Williams Creek and Stud Creek areas checking on 75 or so cameras on 10 monitoring sites he’s set up in the spirit of citizen science. He looks for places with signs of horses — well-trod trails with piles of manure known as stud piles. There he lays down a block of salt and straps a trail camera to the trunk of a nearby tree. 

When Glover gets mad, he gets busy. 

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.” 

An Alberta wild mare nuzzling her foal
An Alberta wild mare nuzzling her foal. Most foals are born between late April and June. (Photo: Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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Graham Overguard uses the same metaphor — grass grazed down to a pool table — but the Sundre-area rancher, and president of the Western Stock Growers’ Association, blames the overgrazing on the lack of management of wild horses. 

Overguard’s family has lived and raised cattle northwest of Sundre since the early 1900s. For a long time, he and his father held an annual permit known as an allotment to manage grass and graze cattle on Alberta’s public rangelands from mid-June to mid-October each year. But he says they sold it two years ago because of competition from feral horses. “There’d be 80 head out there eating all the grass down to the dirt,” he says, “and nothing anybody could do about it.” 

Overguard also believes the horses are driving native ungulates, such as elk, out of the foothills and down into farmland, where they interfere with myriad farming techniques, including swath grazing. This is where farmers leave stubble on their fields after combining in the fall, then allow cattle to eat what’s left. It cuts down on feed costs, and the cattle deposit manure in the fields, which improves the soil for future years, in turn helping to sequester carbon. “But you get a herd of 200 elk come through, and they destroy it pretty quick.”

Overguard has read the management framework. He thinks the province’s horse estimates are low. And he thinks the strategies for reducing numbers are a good start but don’t go far enough. He doesn’t think the contraception program will work, for example. And he fully supports more horses being removed from the wild and adopted out. 

Perhaps the thorniest issue has to do with who we feel deserves to be here.

Culling wild horses remains extremely controversial, and when asked about it, a provincial spokesperson replied simply: “Albertans need to know there are no plans to actively remove horses from the landscape at this time.” 

As for supporting a cull, Overguard sighs and pauses to consider. “If it was done in a humane manner, with science backing it up, then yes,” he says finally. “I’m a rancher, and that means I’m an environmentalist, despite what a lot of people believe. I care about all animals; I don’t want to see anything mistreated. But we do have a problem.”

Since giving up their grazing allotment, the Overguards have had to rent pasture on privately owned land for their 220 or so cow-calf pairs, which is more expensive and time-intensive than grazing on rangeland and, he says, one of the reasons people are selling their cattle and getting out of the business. 

Still, he knows the question of what to do with the free-roaming horses of the eastern slopes is a delicate one — in no small part because of their majesty. “I think they’re beautiful, I really do,” Overguard says. “I use horses almost daily, and I understand. I see both sides of the issue. But I guess it’s all just a matter of philosophy and priority, and how much money a guy has invested in playing this game. If we had 1,500 wild hogs wandering around, I think it would be a different conversation.” 

A wild horse on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountain foothills
A wild horse on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountain foothills. (Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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A wild sorrel Alberta yearling with a thick winter coat blends into a frozen bog west of Sundre, Alta.
A wild sorrel Alberta yearling with a thick winter coat blends into a frozen bog west of Sundre, Alta. (Sandy Sharkey/Can Geo)
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Perhaps the thorniest issue when sorting through the politics of wildness lies not with population counts, carrying capacity, genetics or historical records. It has to do with who we feel deserves to be here. 

Jennifer Welchman teaches environmental ethics at the University of Alberta and likes to assign the case of the horses to her moral philosophy students. She asks students to consider whether it’s right or good to remove something from the landscape that, regardless of provenance, has been around for a long time — in effect has been naturalized, as Parks Canada views the Sable Island horses. She points to Canada’s Species at Risk Act, which allows for the protection of a naturalized species if it has been in Canada for more than 50 years. “Some of the language that gets used around the horses worries me because it’s the same language that people use about immigrants when they are opposing them — you know, people who are different, who aren’t like ‘us,’ do things differently, undercut our working environment and overuse certain resources. It’s very similar at times.” 

When it comes to the management wild populations of large mammals, Welchman thinks it’s our own interactions with them that need managing. Take bears, for example. Bears habituated to people are relocated or killed, but nobody would argue against the inherent wildness of bears or their right to live on the land. She says whether someone thinks horses have the same right to the eastern slopes as bears is likely to be determined by their politics. 

Work by Adela Kincaid, a non-Indigenous scholar and assistant professor in the International Indigenous Studies program at the University of Calgary, shows that trying to neatly categorize people’s values around the horses based on their identity alone is a mistake. Some ranchers see the horses as a problem, some see them as an asset; same goes for government and conservation-minded people. “The nuance makes some people’s heads spin,” Kincaid says. “It can be hard to make sense of it.”

Questions of social identity aside, whether someone regards the horses as wild or as invasive strays appears to be tied intimately to beliefs about their claim on the landscape. Do horses have a right to wild existence based on history as told either by western science or by Indigenous knowledge? Do they have rights based solely on being living animals? Do horses erode the rights of other “truly” wild species? Do they erode the perceived rights of settlers to claim land for economic activity and private ownership? 

Only one thing is for certain: having once been wild, then domesticated, then returned to their own agency, horses trespass across the neat line between wild and non-wild that a non-Indigenous worldview erects and defends in its legislation. 

If this is a war on grass, the sides are far from clear.  

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This story is from the September/October 2024 Issue

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