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Stop the horse slaughter

Dear editor: It is with a heavy heart that I must express my great disappointment in the Government of Alberta for their blatant disregard for the sanctity of the Wild Horses of Alberta for allowing the capture, which will ultimately end in mass slau

Dear editor:

It is with a heavy heart that I must express my great disappointment in the Government of Alberta for their blatant disregard for the sanctity of the Wild Horses of Alberta for allowing the capture, which will ultimately end in mass slaughter.

There are fewer than 900 horses spread over a vast expanse of Alberta, 200 have been sentenced to capture. Environmental and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) has branded these animals as nothing more than feral horses released by loggers in the 1900s. However, there is a strong belief that many of these animals can trace their ancestry to the early Spanish horses.

The government shows no apparent desire to prove or disprove this theory by DNA testing the captured horses. Many of us are not opposed to the capture if some kind of controls were implemented protecting these beautiful animals from assuredly ending up in a slaughterhouse, and without regulations these glorious creatures will be brutally murdered.

There are those who are using the excuse of a hard winter to support this capture, in the guise of ‘helping’ they are sentencing these animals to an unnatural death. These animals have survived years without human ‘help’ moving and pawing through the snow making it easier for the smaller gazing animals to get to the grass below. Furthermore, using the excuse that these animals would over-populate because of no natural predator is a blatant attempt at making others support their capture, but I ask you if the moose or the elk has natural predators, why then are the horses exempt from that same natural cycle?

The most difficult part is knowing that the horses I’ve spent the past years studying will be captured and destroyed for no other reason than greed. The government is making a profit off this exploitation, selling its permits so that these horses can ultimately be sold for a few cents a pound to the slaughterhouses.

These animals are part of our heritage and every Albertan should have the chance to see these animals free roaming and wild. When will we take a stand to protect them, when there are fewer than 500, or 200, fewer than 10? Or maybe when we read that they have now been labeled extinct? Let us band together and show the government we want to protect this part of our heritage. Stop the useless slaughter of wild horses!

Leo Raymaakers

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