Eight years on, Alberta's wild horse advocates see relief
Author: Bill Macfarlane | Date: June 14, 2022 | Website: https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/help-alberta-wildies-society-pleased-with-progress-and-coming-management-plan/
When Darrell Glover began advocating for Alberta's wild horses eight years ago, government plans still called for eliminating the populations entirely. Now a provincial management plan is close to being finalized, with population allowances the herd is unlikely to reach for years. Glover says the pressure is off for now, and his advocacy group is pleased the government is working with them.
Early arguments against the horses centred on competition with native wildlife and grazing cattle. The province had split grazing capacity equally between those two, with no allowance for horses. Yet the herd has shrunk from a recorded peak of more than 1,700 in 2018 to about 1,300 last year, a steady decline Glover has tracked. Alberta Environment and Parks has not yet published last year's counts.
Glover's group also challenged the claim that wild horses have no natural predators. Their 65 trail cameras have captured bears hunting and killing horses, and cougars and wolves make regularly documented kills. Glover doesn't consider any of these animals evil, saying they are simply doing what they do.
He focuses his monitoring west of Sundre, where he rarely meets a horse he doesn't recognize. His Facebook page has more than 280,000 followers worldwide, many of whom know the horses by name.