WILD AT HEART

The feral horses of Sable Island occupy a powerful place in the public imagination. What is the cost of continuing to let them roam free?

- Moira Donovan

What is it that's so compelling about the wild horses of Sable Island? Maybe it's that they turn up where horses have no right to be grazing on a dune or standing on a beach beside the speckled form of a grey seal on an ever-shifting sickle of sand in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 155 kilometres from Nova Scotia.

Sable Island, a narrow 49-kilometre long sandbar situated at the intersection of ocean currents, is a very particular environment. Its recorded history, which dates back to a ninth-century Icelandic saga and its mapping by Portuguese sailors in the 1500s, is littered with accounts of deadly shipwrecks on the island's treacherous shoals.

Since the 20th century, nothing has done more to bolster Sable Island's mythic status than its population of roughly 500 free-roaming horses, whose ancestors were abandoned there in the 1700s. Images of the horses pop up everywhere from coffee table books to decorative scarves; there are documentary films and children's books about them. These creations rest on an understanding of the horses as a symbol of wildness, in tune with their ecosystem.

Yet the extent to which that ecosystem is in tune with them is something of a mystery. To address that, scientists have embarked on a multi-year study of the horses' relationship to the island's ecosystems, a project titled Fences in the Sand by officials with Parks Canada and the Sable Island Institute. "There's no question that horses are affecting the landscape," says Dan Kehler, park ecologist for Sable Island National Park Reserve. "I think the question for us is, what are the consequences of some of those effects?"