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Volume 11 Issue 26
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Photo courtesy Ken McLeod
Ken McLeod stands amongst some of Alberta’s wild horses, animals that are becoming a rare sight these days. McLeod has made it his life’s work to protect the wild bands.
Hoofing it across Alberta
A local man’s quest to save the wild stock by Jaime Polmateer jaime@lloydminstersource.com
Ken McLeod realizes he’s just one man, but he hopes his efforts will help save those without a voice, Alberta’s wild horses. Since he was just a kid, McLeod said he had a soft spot for the free horses that gallop across southern Alberta’s foothills. Both his father and grandfather before him used to domesticate the animals and sell them to the Canadian Cavalry. McLeod personally trained his first, a wild horse named Johnny Law, when he was just 12 years old. Now, he said he believes the province’s wild horses are under threat by the Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD). The ESRD has been culling the beasts because they overgraze cattle pastures and are worth money when broken in and sold privately, or even worse for horse lovers, butchered and sold for meat.
“They’ve run in the foothills for hundreds of years, long before the white man ever came there, and it’s basically home to the natural horse of the wild,” McLeod said. “It’s just a horrible thing that’s been happening with these horses and we better protect them before it is too late.” McLeod says the ESRD’s claim that the horses are eating all the grazing grass for cattle is “very untrue.” He’s spent months in the wild, studying the animals and talking to ecologists and other wildlife specialists, and the claims of overgrazing don’t hold any weight for the Alcurve, Alta. man. There have been close to 50 studies done on the theory, some as recent as a few weeks ago, none of which have turned up evidence to support the accusations. The horses are mainly found on crown land, where the provincial government offers leases to ranchers, and this is where McLeod thinks the real problem is. “It’s just the ranchers leasing the land that basically want free horses for their own greed and
that’s been proven by many people,” he said. The area he studies is west of Sundre, stretching nearly 95-km and about 65-km wide, which he said is plenty of space for the animals to keep to themselves. Government reports say there are upwards of 600 wild horses left in the area, but McLeod, who visits the horses every few months for two to eight weeks at a time, said according to his observations, the number is likely closer to 450. The most recent cull happened in winter of 2014 when the ESRD trapped 48 head of horses in hidden corals set up throughout the WHAT area. Culls tend to happen in mid-winter, usually around February, when horses are hungry and easily coaxed into the traps with feed that is left for them. They ESRD remove up to a band at a time, a band of horses being anywhere from three to 14 head, and more than 90 per cent are butchered for meat and sent overseas to places like Belgium, France and further to Japan. See “Cull,” Page 6
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