LOVELL, Wyo. – When Alberta rancher and songwriter Ian Tyson was researching a new song about the survival of wild horses in North America, he decided to visit the source.
His travels took him to the Pryor Mountain wild mustangs, a federally protected herd along the Montana-Wyoming border.
About a day’s drive from Tyson’s ranch southeast of Longview, Alta., this herd has characteristics common to the Arabian-Barb horse bred in Andalusia and Seville in the 16th century.
“I wanted to write the definitive story of La Primera and this herd is the purest bunch of Spanish mustangs around,” said Tyson, whose song, La Primera, was also published as a children’s book, with illustrations by British Columbia artist Adeline Halvorson, who grew up in Saskatchewan.
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Tyson isn’t the only Canadian connection to the herd. The late Will James, who between 1924 and 1942 became a best-selling author and artist of cowboy culture, owned the Rocking R Ranch near Pryor, Mont. In his books, which included Smoky the Cowhorse and The Three Mustangeers, he often referred to this herd of mustangs, which has lived in the area for at least 200 years.
The Pryor Mountain mustangs have been genetically linked to the Spanish colonial horses brought to North America by Hernando Cortes in 1519.
“Some horses that people call mustangs are really just feral horses, but these Pryor horses are the real thing. They don’t look like any other horse you’ve ever seen,” Tyson said.
“You can see they are throwbacks to the old mustangs, with the zebra stripes on their legs.”
Other characteristics include small ears, flat foreheads, tapered muzzles and deep and narrow chests. They are small, averaging 13 to 15 hands, with duns (bays with black points and a dorsal stripe) and blue grullas being the dominant colour. They also have five large lumbar vertebrae, while most modern breeds have six.
“It’s a fused vertebrae,” said Matt Dillon, director of the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Centre in Lovell, Wyo., a nonprofit educational centre dedicated to preserving the local herd and other American mustangs.
Most of the herd’s 135 horses survive in a rugged and remote environment. It comprises small family bands, each consisting of a dominant stallion and several mares and foals. Roaming nearby are bachelor herds, stallions that are too young to fight for their own mares.
Some of the bands live on the mountainside while others roam the high desert at the base of the cliffs. With canyons and fences confining the horses to the range’s 38,000 acres, water can be scarce, limited to snow and melt water pools.
Established in 1968, the Pryor Mountain preserve was the first federal wild horse range.
Approximately 35,000 wild horses and burros live in the United States, compared to several hundred in Canada, mainly in British Columbia and Alberta.
Canada’s only federally protected herd is on Nova Scotia’s Sable Island. Saskatchewan recently passed legislation protecting 40 wild ponies in the Bronson Forest north of Lloyd-minster.
The Wild Horse of Alberta Society (WHOA) is lobbying the province to legislate protection of its 350 wild horses near Sundre area.
More than 20 wild horses have been shot to death in Alberta in the past four years.
Wild horses fall under the Stray Animal Act in Alberta, and officials refer to them as being feral, which WHOA president Bob Henderson said implies they are domestic horses gone wild.
“So we want to change the terminology,” he said.
“We’d like to see them referred to as wild free-roaming horses. After all, how long does an animal have to regenerate itself in the wild before it’s considered wild?”
Henderson said the University of Saskatchewan is conducting DNA tests to establish links between the Sundre herd and Spanish horses.
Even though the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 protects U.S. mustangs, they are regularly culled for population control. The Bureau of Land Management organizes roundups and corralled animals are put up for adoption.
Approximately 32,000 horses that haven’t been adopted are now penned in government holding areas.
Dillon said a better way to control populations is to inject mares with the contraceptive Porcine Zona Pellucida. In September, 39 Pryor Mountain mares received the PZP vaccination, which prevents conception for almost two years.
“I consider the horses wildlife, so they should be managed as wildlife,” he said.
“You have to look at the science and not make decisions based on just emotions, or junk science.”
Roundups pit those who don’t want to see the horses lose their freedom against many in the hunting and livestock sectors who would prefer they be removed to make way for more cattle and wildlife.
U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration recently proposed relocating thousands of mustangs to the East and Midwest, which mustang lovers say violates the 1971 act.
This past year, 57 members of the Pryor herd were rounded up. All were adopted, in part because the herd enjoys a celebrity status. One of its stallions, a palomino called Cloud, has been the subject of TV documentaries and books by film maker Ginger Kathrens.
However, other American herds suffered significant culls. Older horses can be sold, and some believe many were shipped to Canadian and Mexican slaughter plants.
Tyson said the fight to save wild horses in the U.S. and Canada is a worthy one.
“It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of the West. It’s slipping away. We need to hang on to what’s left of it.”
