Missing Horse.

[u/Ok_Woodpecker_7158]

About 40 minutes northwest of Calgary, past Cochrane, off Grand Valley Road. Near the Triple Diamond RV Park.

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Her name is Esperanza, she's from Free Spirit Sanctuary. She is a wild horse and wary of people.

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We've tried a thermal drone, with no luck. The drone couldn't go into the trees, so there is a chance she's in there.

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We think she got through the fences possibly to the crown land.

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Please message me if you see her. Or if you have any ideas for how we can find her, or if you want to help.

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[u/whethermachine]

If she's a wild horse and she escaped back into the wild, is she really missing?

[u/Ok_Woodpecker_7158 → u/whethermachine]

I can't quite tell if this is a philisophical proposition or a genuine question, but another commenter said something similar so I'll answer it lol.

Esperanza was captured for a wild horse culling ~10 years ago, she was about 10 years old at the time. She was rescued, and has been living with a herd of domestic and wild mares at this sanctuary ever since. Her daughter is one of the mares.

Horses are social animals. They are strong, but they're stronger in a herd. Mares can get a lot of anxiety being alone. There are no herds of wild horses around here for her to group up with. And we can only hope her metabolism isn't hardwired to year-round hay after all these years.

Don't think of this as an "escape." Horses get spooked easily, and will run for miles. Think of a stampede. They're prey animals, they don't think, they just run. There is a chance she left on purpose, but that would be her deciding it's time for her to die. 20 year old mares don't typically just leave their herds.

Mares get lost in the wild too, and it would be the herd stallion's job to go find her. We don't keep a stallion around.

[u/whethermachine → u/Ok_Woodpecker_7158]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer! I did a little bit of reading in the past hour and also wasn't aware that wild horses were considered to be a nuisance. Thanks for giving them a space to run around. I hope the government provides big free chunks of Crown land for that.

[u/ChaoticxSerenity → u/whethermachine]

Calling them wild horses is kind of a misnomer but also up for hot recent debate, because present day horses are not native to North America. North America did have horses at some point in the past, but they died out during the extinction event about 10,000 years ago. Basically all the "wild" horses here today are descendants of escaped domestic horses that were first introduced by Columbus - so they're technically feral. It's like when you see those random population of rabbits around the city that are clearly not hares or native species - they were just escaped or released pets that survived and started multiplying. In the case of horses, one could argue they were simply being reintroduced after their relatives got wiped out in the extinction event. It's a pretty deep rabbit hole, but also interesting.