Most North Americans have two main and opposing viewpoints when it comes to so-called wild horses. Some want to protect them as indigenous heritage breeds, truly wild by definition, while others believe wild horses are the epitome of feral – once domesticated animals, now living at large, an “exotic” species compromising wildlife habitat and interfering with human activities. Often a push-pull between hearts and minds, we can go from holding up the wild horses as paragons of freedom and independence, to seeing them as roving scoundrels, nuisances on the landscape that need to be eradicated or at least diminished. The arguments and the politics vary widely depending on the location of the horses.
Sable Island
Soon everyone will know the “definitive story of the Sable Island horses,” said Philip McLoughlin, a University of Saskatchewan population ecologist. He has studied these iconic animals for two decades. For 400 years, the horses have endured the punishing environment of what is essentially a 140-kilometre-long, 1.5-kilometre wide, crescent-shaped sandbar off the southwest coast of mainland Nova Scotia.
Romantic lore says they are descended from horses that swam to shore after countless area shipwrecks. Historical documentation has suggested they were introduced deliberately by the British during the expulsion of Acadians from Atlantic Canada in the mid-1700s.