Breed: The wild horses of Sable Island

BREED

The wild horses of Sable Island

Sable Island’s wild horses have inspired photographers and documentary film makers alike, and as SUZY JARRATT discovered, with very good reason.

When the TV screens go fuzzy on Sable Island everyone blames the

horses, who when they get itchy, rub their

rears against the island’s satellite dish.

Horses in other countries can scratch

on branches and tree trunks, but not on

this remote Canadian island located 160 where there is one scrawny pine which has grown only a metre in 50 years.

Set alone in the Atlantic Ocean, Sable Island (‘sable’ is French for ‘sand’) is an approximately 40 kilometre sand bar shrouded in fog for a third of each year. Crescent-shaped and narrow, it’s renowned for shipwrecks, has the world’s biggest breeding colony of grey seals and nine years ago was decreed a National Park Reserve. The island is most famous for wild horses and presently there are about 500 living amid the dunes and grasslands.

Horses were first sent to graze on Sable back in 1737 and most were stolen by fishermen. In 1760, according to Nova Scotia Museum’s Education Department, a merchant named Thomas Hancock shipped 60 to the island. They had originally belonged to the Acadians, French immigrants who in the 1600s settled in Nova Scotia, known then as Acadia. The horses they brought from France were a mixture of types which later interbred with Friesians and Andalusians.

When the Acadians refused to sign an oath of allegiance to Britain (which then had control of the region) they were deported and forced to abandon their livestock. So Hancock, who was paid to transport the settlers to the American colonies, helped himself to some of their horses, dropping them on deserted Sable Island where they survived and became wild.

The first people to settle on Sable came with the Lifesaving Station in 1801, and as folklore has it, so did a stallion named

ABOVE: The Sable Island horses are short and stocky with thick, shaggy coats and long manes and tails. FACING PAGE: The horses’ main diet is Marram, a coarse grass which grows in sand (Images by Sarah Medill, © Parks Canada).

Jolly. He was a registered Canadian Horse, a small hardy breed resistant to harsh conditions, and the first horse to be officially recorded on the island. Many of the herd today display his characteristics.

For the next 150 years people relied on the horses to haul lifeboats to shipwreck sites, and men from the Lifesaving Station rode them around the shoreline searching for ships in distress. Some were taken for sale in Nova Scotia’s capital Halifax, but failed to fetch good prices so a few Morgans and more Canadians like Jolly were introduced to breed with the mares. However, there are accounts suggesting that this wasn’t particularly successful. The native Sable stallions fiercely defended their mares, so that few imported stallions were able to breed with them.

Today’s Sable Island horses look much the same as ever they did: short and stocky with thick, shaggy coats; tails and manes that drag along the ground; and long hooves tending to turn up. Their main diet is marram, a coarse grass which grows in sand. The horses dig for much of their fresh water. Rain seeps through the sand until it meets salt water. Fresh water floats on top of salt water and the horses know where to dig until small pools fill the hole. There are also freshwater pools which are a life-saving source for the animals.

But back in the ‘50s there was a move to end these lives. Biologists and ecologists argued the horses were not native to the island and were destroying it. They would have been slaughtered or sent to work in coal mines had it not been for a letter-writing campaign by schoolchildren begging the then Prime Minister to save the Sable Island herd. In 1960 the horses were officially protected by Canadian law.

A 2007 study has since proved that the horses have been isolated long enough to become genetically unique. Nova Scotia declared them the province’s official horse in 2008, and in 2011 Parks Canada took over their custodial role, which was to protect but not manage them. Any intervention is illegal - no farriers, dentists or vets for them. Abbie Branchflower, a behavioural researcher, documented her experiences when first encountering them: ‘Walking among the dunes I gained an appreciation for the wild and rugged lives they live. The sand is difficult to walk on – yet they canter up dunes as if it’s nothing. The island is a beautiful but brutal place. Horses walk along the beach steps away from piles of bleached bones, and the weather can turn in an instant from sun to pouring rain. Winter can be cruel to the young and very old, but these horses are perfectly, amazingly adapted to the life they live’.

Another researcher was amazed that they have survived for so long, commenting that it was difficult to believe they were eking out a living on a little sandbar miles from anywhere.

The horses pay little attention to human visitors, who are not permitted to approach them. As one tourist noted: ‘close by a stallion was idly scratching on some coarse dry roots, he didn’t even look up, then just ambled away grumbling quietly to himself’.