In-depth

Previous In-depths Landmark land settlement Carbon Conundrum Caribou in Canada The Mackenzie Delta Torngat Mountains Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) Travels with Louis British Columbia's Gulf Islands Moose on the loose Sustainable cities Icebergs Canada's musical landscape Quebec's James Bay Ottawa Valley Green with jade Hunting for cures Wild horses Canada's Bison Canada's place in the world Lessons learned in schools Power of powwows Cougars in Canada Greenland sharks Boreal birds Arctic grizzlies Lake Erie's Fire in the boreal forest Energy matters Parks for all Bighorn sheep Finding our way in the wilderness Shipwrecks of Nova Scotia Canada's grizzly bears

Photo: Patrice Halley

FEATURES Family tree Alien species? U.S. vs. Canada Land-claims Lone horseman Cave art Ts’yl-os Q&A DEPARTMENTS • Knowledge Toolbox • Cartographer’s table • Just the facts • From the CG archives

How to rescue a wild horse
A comparison of American and Canadian policies
Story by Chris Mason

Velma Johnston, later to become known as Wild Horse Annie, was driving her car to work one morning in Nevada when a truck pulling a horse trailer cut in front of her. The blood streaming from the trailer shocked Johnston, as did the sight of the overcrowded, nearly dead horses that piled off the vehicle after she followed the truck to a horse-rendering plant.

What she saw compelled Johnston to fight to protect wild horses. A series of small victories led to the U.S. government passing a law in 1959 that restricted the trapping and poisoning of the horses. The law quickly became known as the Wild Horse Annie Act. It evolved into the 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act, which recognized the historic value of wild horses in the West and protected them on public lands.

The tale in Canada is less dramatic, and, in the eyes of wild-horse enthusiasts, less successful.

Associations have formed slowly to push the government toward protecting wild horses from ranchers, poachers and hunters. Some were formed decades ago, others as recently as 2002.

"We didn’t have a Wild Horse Annie here," says David Williams, executive director and president of the Friends of the Nemaiah Valley, in B.C. "People in the U.S. realized how fast their frontier character was disappearing and that the horse was a last symbol they could save."

In the U.S., lobbying on behalf of wild horses is led by the ISPMB. Government protection is led by the Bureau of Land Management at the federal level.

In Canada, a series of associations and societies dot the map in British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia; no single organization oversees wild horses from coast to coast. Likewise, protection of the animals is a provincial matter, with the exception of the federally owned Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia, where about 200 wild horses roam.

In the absence of one unified set of regulations, in Canada wild horses fall under the jurisdiction of the Grazing Act in British Columbia, the Stray Animals Act in Alberta and the Sable Island Regulations section of the Canadian Shipping Act on Sable Island.

In 1993, Alberta introduced the Horse Capture Plan, which regulates the capture of wild, or feral, horses. Between 25 and 35 horses are captured each year, whereas in the decade from 1962 to 1972 about 2,000 horses were captured in Alberta.

Bob Henderson, president of the Wild Horses of Alberta Society, says his organization has stopped lobbying the federal government because they’ve been told the horses fall outside that jurisdiction. "Although we would like to see all free-roaming horses in Canada offered the same protection as the Sable Island horses, we can only hope that we can succeed here in Alberta," Henderson says. "Maybe in doing that we can influence other provincial governments to do the same."

top