Wild Spanish mustangs roam the foothills of  the Rocky Mountains in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. So wild, so shy, are these glorious creatures that they’re hardly ever seen. Their very wildness may eventually bring about their destruction.

Nobody knows just how many mustangs live in Western Canada today.
`              See Shandi - Canada's bred-in-the-wild Spanish mustang

Historically - back when there were numbers “worth counting” -  people counted millions of wild mustangs  in the Canadian West (in the 19th century), then thousands (mid-20th century), then hundreds (1980s), until today, when no one counts anymore because  it’s almost impossible to find them. Hunters for dog food factories and European dining tables  took most of the “wildies.” Unbelievably, "sport" hunters, too, took out thousands of wild horses. It still is perfectly legal to shoot wild horses on private property in Western Canada, though this particularly hideous "sport" is largely a thing of the past as the horses have practically disappeared.

Today wild mustangs  in Western Canada may number under 200. Sixty to 70 head are known to run in the Chilcotin range in BC, and there is a known herd in the Siffleur Wilderness Area in southern Alberta numbering perhaps 100.

The horror for naturalists and horse lovers is that these excruciatingly small herds may represent an endangered gene pool of the most pure Spanish stock in all of North America.

South of the border, in the United States, meanwhile, thousands of mustangs run free under the protection of  federal law. The Canadians have simply found it easy to ignore their own small herds. Out of sight, out of mind.

Many folks  believe that wild horses are, anyway,  only the descendants of work animals from farms that have been turned into the wild. Just feral horses. This strain of popular opinion  makes the true mustangs out to be little more than vermin, to be hunted, shot and skinned. Mainstream  media feed such ill informed opinion. Magazine and newspaper editors often fail to distinguish  between  the truly wild, rare Spanish mustang and a plentiful-but-unremarkable  population  of feral horses roaming the countryside. For example,  Macleans magazine in an article titled  “The Wild Ones” perpetuated this brand of misinformation in 1982. In “The Wild Ones” journalist  Miro Cernetig mistakes a large herd of  lumpen farm horses on an Alberta military base  for “mustangs.”

Cernetig writes :
 

While some horse fanciers would like to believe Alberta’s wild horses have traces of romantic [ 18th century]  history in their blood, the real story is more mundane. Most of these beasts are offspring of farm stock left behind in the 30s; others descend from ranch horses that escaped or were turned loose.

The Canadian mustangs have become utterly reclusive over the years. And that is how our wildies have, quite possibly, perpetuated a precious, purebred bloodline. The Canadian mustang population  may be more pure in its Spanish pedigree than any other population in North America. It is surmised that the relative remoteness of the Canadian frontier, compared to the intense settlement pattern of  the Western frontier in the United States,  may have provided  a more secluded wild horse refuge. The Canadians mustangs may, therefore, have easily kept to themselves and not become cross-bred, as they did in southern regions of the continent. History documents that native peoples of the Canadian West were, logically, the last to acquire the horses as the herds spread from the Spanish settlements northward up the American continent. Canadian territory remains less settled to this day.

And there hide the last wildies, blood descendants of the original Spanish stock of the Conquistadors,  fabled ponies of the North American Indian.

The American Mustang Association has registered one captive Canadian horse, Shandi.  This horse descends from  a wild dam and sire of the Siffleur herd of Southern Alberta. Shandi  is a 22-year-old dun mare owned by Steve Howlett of  Dugald, Manitoba.

Find out more about Shandi and the Canadian wild mustangs, and how we can work together to save the Last Wild Horses of the Canadian West.

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