Your support makes a difference in their preservation and survival.

A population with limited legal protection

Here at the Help Alberta Wildies Society, we are driven by a single goal:

Save and protect the free-roaming wild horses with rare Spanish bloodlines throughout the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.

We are a team of passionate volunteers with boots-on-the-ground knowledge and experience, doing our best to save as many of these majestic animals as we can from the constant threat of removal by the provincial government, the cattlemen’s lobby, and other interest groups.

Alberta does not classify its free-roaming horses as wildlife. Under the province's Stray Animals Act, they're legally "stray animals" — the same designation as an escaped farm animal. That single classification decision means none of Alberta's wildlife protections apply. Their fate instead runs entirely through a provincial management framework, introduced in 2023, that authorizes removal, adoption, and contraception whenever government surveys judge a zone to have exceeded its population threshold.

Strip away the numbers debate, and the core tension is this: a small, genetically distinctive, centuries-rooted population is currently subject to a legal framework that treats it the same as loose livestock — and the trigger for removal is based on count data that experts on both sides acknowledge is uncertain. If population control proceeds on disputed numbers, there's no way to walk it back once horses are gone. Genetic lineage, once lost from a population this small, doesn't come back.

That's the actual stake: not whether Alberta's landscape can support horses at all — clearly it has, for centuries — but whether decisions that could permanently reduce an irreplaceable population are being made on evidence solid enough to justify that kind of permanence.