Help Alberta Wildies Society pleased with progress and coming management plan

When Darrell Glover started advocating for additional protections for Alberta's wild horses there were still plans to eliminate populations completely.

Eight years later a provincial management plan is close to being finalized, with population allowances the wild herd is unlikely to hit for years to come.

"The pressure is off now for the next few years until we see a different trend develop," said Glover. "So in the meantime we're pretty happy as an advocacy group that the government is working with us and we're really anxious to see how this goes over the next few years under this new plan."

One of the early arguments against allowing the horses to persist was two fold - competition with native wildlife and grazing cattle. The province had divided the available grazing capacity equally between the two - no allowance was made for the horses.

As of last year, there were about 1,300 wild horses in the province, down from a recorded peak of more than 1,700 in 2018.

"There has been a steady decline of the numbers ever since we've been monitoring," Glover says.

"There used to be a very strong narrative that the wild horses had no natural predators, so we took it upon ourselves to prove otherwise."

But a network of trail cameras - 65 at the moment - have captured bears hunting and killing the horses. Cougars and wolves also make regularly documented kills.

"We don't consider any of those animals evil, they're just being bears wolves and cougars and that's what they do," he says, adding they all have every right to exist.

"What our mission is, is to monitor the birth rates of the wild horses right up to the mortality," Glover says. He concentrates his considerable time and effort in the area just west of Sundre, where he rarely encounters a horse he doesn't recognize.

Glover's time in the field and talent for documenting what's happening there has led the 71-year-old to run a popular Facebook page with more than 280,000 followers from around the world.

"Most of the people who follow our page know these horse by name, and it's become a big club really, a big fan club for these wild horses."

According to the province the majority of feral horses along the Eastern slopes date back to the early 1900's. Last year's population counts have not yet been published by Alberta Environment and Parks.