2025 wild horse numbers research

Welcome to our wild horse numbers research page

Where we will go through a brief overview of some of our research this year. Regarding the wild horse numbers Major updates relating to wild horse numbers will be published here and on our deep dive wild horse numbers blog, where each topic addressed here will recieve a further investigative study on our blog.

Let's get right to it, the numbers. Let's start with what we can tell you as a fact, and prove through photos and documents. As of Novemeber 2025 we have 945 wild horses in our files. 131 bands. Averaging 7 horses per band. ( We will try update these numbers monthly for you, if you do not see a current update please email us)

Now lets get into what the public numbers are. First we have studies that say there are less than 1000 wild horses in Alberta, we also have studies that say there's 1200, 1500 and even some suggesting over 3000. Who is right ? And how can we find out the truth? To answer the first question, we would like to suggest no one. No one is right on this topic. The Aereal surveys being the main method used, is insufficientand and inaccurate at best, yes they provide an estimate, but not a down right number. This is due to many reasons. Some being the season, the coverage, the areas where horses can quite frankly just go unnoticed, then add on the fact that aereal surveys often miss huge areas. Vast areas, and sometimes, entire equine zones go unaccounted.

The second reason in our opinion, for inaccurate numbers is personal interests, personal feelings and personal biases. Now this is both a bias for protecting wild horses and/or a bias towards removing them. Both can affect the number outcome of the numbers provided.

If people are scared for the wild horses to be culled, lowering these numbers could easily help save them..although, not forever, and we will tell you why. If we try to protect and save something built and founded on lies, it will surely fall. It will surely fail. We can not save the wild horses if we are building their salvation on inaccurate numbers.

The same goes for those who have personal gain in the removal and cull of the wild horses, in these instances it would be farmers, who may want to lease additional cattle in place of the wild horses, conservationists who wish to see grass and birds, above wild horses, or the government who does not particularly want their crown land full of wild horses or tourists, and finally forestry companies who may deem wild horses a threat to their newly seeded “forests”, again this is all just our opinion.

Now you could argue to say that we too have a personal bias, due to the fact that we love wild horses too, and we study and research them, but where we choose to differ is by not having a bias towards truth, choosing to tell the truth and the facts regardless. Our love for the wild horses cannot over ride the need for truth and transparency, and we believe to save the wild horses transparency must be given to all. Our goal is to show accurate numbers so we can then build a plan to protect them.

Let's take a look at aereal counts shall we?

We can find publicly available survey counts for almost every year between 2024-2013 with the acception of a few missing years, or missing zones. So lets take a look at the numbers. In 2024 the aereal survey count estimated 1478 wild horses. However..only 4 of the 6 equine zones were surveyed and checked. As the government choses not to survey every zone every year due to costs associated with that. There are a few things, that personally struck us as unusual. First the missing zones. How can we give accurate estimates if we only survey a certain area? What zones are missing in 2024 ? The Nordegg zone, and the Brazeau zone. These are vast areas of land, both having wild horses present. That is a fact.

Now lets look at number fluctuations. We will use an example, to help you see what we see when we look at these fluctuations, and hopefully, youll be able to point out the areas of concern for yourselves. If we look at a herd. Lets say this herd has 8 horses in this band. 1 stallion 4 mares and 3 yearlings. We can expect this same band of 8 to increase to 12 with 4 new foals by the next foaling season. Now you can see how numbers can quickly add up. The issue to debate here is this. How many of the foals and yearlings will survive to adulthood? Are the numbers truly increasing? Are so many foals getting attacked by predators that the population stays stagnant? This is the areas we need to study. So lets have a look, the first area of concern for us when researching this is the elbow zone. Please be patient because we need more boots on the ground field research in this zone to bring more clarity here. However we will just point out some of the discrepancies in the numbers regarding this zone.in 2024 Elbow management zone had a recorded..(or estimated) total of 111 wild horses accounted for. This sounds fairly reasonable until you take a look at 2023s count. Totalling: 0. (We will add in that another document for 2023 was found stating 84 horses, either 0 or 84, will both prove the point that it is merely an estimate, if its 0 its unfactual and if its 84 it implies the zone had not 1 foal survive that foaling season. Either this zone had these horses unaccounted for in the survey, or no aereal survey was done there for 2023, either way it can not be accurate numbers, merely an estimate. Now in 2023 we had a count done for Nordegg zone and Brazeau zone. N: 33 B: 18 the the following year 2024 these zones go unaccounted. We must assume these numbers have increased, however again that leaves us back to another estimate. The last count i have found where a zone is not missing is back in 2019, this is the most reason year we can find a full count done throughout the equine management zones. The tally on the 2019 count was : 1679 wild horses. This signifies that the wild horse count has steadily gone down, despite having no culls in place?

That means not only are foals not living but mares and stallions would have to be dying at alarming rates as well to have the population drop by over 200 wild horses in 6 years. The numbers just do not add up no matter how you look at them. So this is where our number research project begins. Let's start by counting the horses and seeing how many there truly are. I will say, as of nov. 2025 we have documented 35 wild horses in the nordeg zone and 45 wild horses in the brazeau zone, let’s get the facts right, so we can protect them based on transparency. lets see if the 2025 or 2026 aereal counts will reflects accurate numbers in all zones? Stay tuned.

We will take some time to zone out the 131 bands we have documented and we will start tallying them not only by band numbers and file number so but by zones as well with boots on the ground photos and evidence to support the claims. If you would like to further dive into this numbers research please tune into our blog where we will break down each topic regarding the numbers further thorough and extensive detail. Thanks for reading - wild horse advocates