Hunters Bay Radio
MUSKOKA DRAWDOWN AUD FISCHER AUGUST 31 2024
You're a source for community, MSCOCA made talk shows are on MSCOCA magazine, the Bay '88/7. Hey, this is Dr. Shervin, MSCOCA magazine is brought to you by Dairy Lane Dental, keeping MSCOCA smiling for over 30 years. Please visit DairylaneDental.com. This is MSCOCA Drawdown. Welcome to MSCOCA Drawdown, I'm your host, Frank DeYoung. MSCOCA Drawdown is part of Climate Action MSCOCA. Go to the Climate Action MSCOCA website and register for the weekly newsletter to learn about cold weather heat pumps, learn about the seniors for climate organization, which is planning a day of action on October 1st. My guest today is Oud Fisher, and she lives in Whitehorse, and for four years, she has run a Facebook group about the wildies and the wildies are wild horses that happen to live in Yukon. So Oud, are you an animal rights activist? In a roundabout sort of way I am, I'm more wanting to change how people view animals and see them so that they realize they are sentient beings just like us. They have their own lives to lead. Are these domesticated horses or are they wild horses? About a few decades ago, they were domesticated, but there were various sort of waves of a horse abandonment that happened since the Europeans first came to the Yukon, and our current wildies, most of them date back to the 80s and early 90s. So at one time they were domesticated, but then they became feral and started because they were stallions in the group, they started to breed. So the horses that are followed now, almost all of them have been born in the wild. And at that point, you can start calling them wild. There's a lot of controversy. In a way, the word feral and the word wild are both accurate. Their own refers to the fact that they originally came from domesticated horses, wild refers to the fact that they now live like wild animals, that they procrastinate the wild, they survive in the wild all on their own. So both terms can be correct. There's no ferryer goes in to take care of their hooves and nobody feeds them. Most of them, well, you can't handle them, they're completely wild, they won't let you near them, so their feet have to be worn naturally. And since they've been several generations now in the wild, they've been selected for animals that can survive those conditions. So their feet aren't in top condition, but they're not bad. They keep them trimmed by constant movement. In the wintertime, they get a little longer, but then they act like snow shovels. They're very useful. And all the wildies have very big feet because they've adapted to winter conditions. Yeah. Are you suggesting that over even a couple of decades, their feet get larger? Well, when they were first abandoned, it was like 100 horses were abandoned each sort of time. There were a lot of horses. There was a lot of die off at first. So only those that had the right genes got to survive and propagate. So evolution can happen actually quite quickly, especially with an animal that was originally designed for northern conditions, because all our domesticated horses originally came from horses that traveled across the Beringland Bridge. So all our horses have the DNA in them to adapt quickly back to the north. So do today's horses have different DNA than the original horses that came across? It's now most paleobol just are now coming to the conclusion that they are genetically similar enough to domesticated horses, that they can be considered the same species. But just a different breed. So there's enough genetic variation to be a different breed, maybe at most a subspecies, but they're the same species. So in order to live in Yukon, most animals have a lot of hair and they're used to the cold because it sometimes goes down to 50 degrees below. Are you saying that these domesticated horses have learned how to live in those extreme temperatures? They had them with the Yakut's ponies in Siberia that originally the Yakut's ponies came from most southern horses, but within 800 years, they adapted so well to Siberian conditions that now they go into a type of standing hibernation when it's minus 80 degrees or something horrible in Siberia. And they also have antifreeze in their blood. And it only took 800 years, maybe even less for them to adapt back to what horses used to be because they used to be a northern like subarctic species. And with our horses, they are definitely on their way because I've seen them when it gets really cold, they stand a lot and just wait it out. And nobody's really researched whether they have now antifreeze in their blood, whether they are now going to standing hibernation, just like the Yakut's ponies, but they can handle a lot that winter throws at them there. How long have you been doing this and keeping tabs on these horses and what does the government think of them? Are they protected or are they considered feral or are they fair game for anyone to shoot or? I've been following them for about four years now since pandemics of 2020. Last year, we did have some horses shot and that was a real eye opener and I've really looked into all the disappearances we've had since 2019. Nobody told me when I started, but there was a lot of negativity and now I think it's because they didn't want me to find this out, that horses were being shot in the valley. And at that time, since about a few months ago, the horses had zero protections. They could shoot them. The only thing is you weren't allowed to leave them suffering. And that would have come under animal abuse. And sadly, horses are not easy to shoot. So a lot of them end up severely injured and then it takes them weeks to die. And that would have come under animal abuse, but about a month or so ago, the new animal welfare laws finally came into effect in the Yukon. We finally caught up with the rest of Canada. And now it's illegal to shoot wild horses, to harass them, to harm them in any way, unless you have permission from the government. So they're not completely protected. The government can still decide to do whatever they want with them. But if we can keep the social media group really strong, the government will be reluctant to give the okay to shoot them and find more humane ways to manage. Would you like to see these horses be considered by government and by everyone as the same as a moose or a grizzly or any other wild animal? I would. But I think with the horses, because they have such a different relationship to us humans, we should never allow hunting off them. So they can't ever become fully like we see the other wildlife because it would just be unacceptable for most people. So if they could get some kind of a special wildlife status like the Sable Island horses have, so that they are considered reintroduced heritage wildlife species that has its own special rules. Are they all on crown land or do they travel on to people's private land? Most of them are on settlement land, and the First Nations are quite welcoming towards them, so they're safe on the First Nations settlement land. Then they of course wander on to crown land and on to private land. And it's when they wander on to private land that they are on most danger. Even though it depends, because some people love having them around and some people don't. So are there roads that go through, they're close to the Alaska highway, aren't they? Why is there not a issue? There's a major highway that goes through the Wild Horse territory in the Ibex Valley. But there are also tons of elk, they were like way more elk than horses. If you watch them, the horses now have learned how to navigate the highway. They will bunch up and wait until the lead horse gives the okay, and then they cross the highway. And the elk do something similar, but of course they still animals and things can sometimes go wrong and occasionally an animal is hit on the road. But it's really no different than if an elk got hit or a moose got hit. I don't know, maybe one gets hit on every two or three years or so, but it does happen and it is a danger. But then it is with the elk and the moose as well. Bye, Mascoka for Mascoka. Your collection of Mascoka-based talk shows, Mascoka Magazine, the Bay, 887. I'm Dr. Shervin from Dairy Lane Dental and you're listening to Mascoka Magazine. Welcome back to Mascoka Drawdown, my guest is Oud Fisher, and she's talking about the wildies, which are the wild horses of Yukon, the most northerly group of wild horses in the world. Is that not the case? Oud. Yeah, but it is because we do have a few horses that are more northern, like in Siberia, but those horses are fed by humans. They watched over by humans, so they don't, they're not the same as us because the majority of our horses have no help whatsoever from humans. The ones that live really close to the First Nations settlement area, sometimes they are given a little bit of hay in the winter because the people of them, but most of the horses, the horses in the backcountry, the horses that are in other areas, they have no help whatsoever. So they truly on their own and can be considered truly wild. So in Yukon, how many roughly are there at the moment? Nobody really knows because the horses are formed by people free ranging horses and then horses becoming lost to the herd or horses being abandoned because somebody can no longer care for them. So it's currently becoming wild is happening all over the Yukon, even though the new laws are going to heavily restrict free ranging. So we really don't know, you hear rumors of people saying, Oh, when I go hunting, I see tons of wild horses in this area, in this area, but nobody studied them, nobody knows. In our small area that we study in the Ibex Valley, they're around because they would have been 28 horses, but now they only 20 horses because of the shootings. But we've had five foals born so far. So that goes up to 25 and we're still awaiting a few more foals than people. And now I want to read a list of the names that you have named some of your horses. There's Rosetta, Pandora, Lupin, Onyx, Willow, mystery, Tiger, Lily, Fairwind, Scout, Meadows, Sundance, Pippin, Tamara, Clark, Juniper, Timber, Sierra, Winter, Aurora, tornado, Mardella. How many horses do you have them all named out? Yes. If you want to study them, you have to have names or numbers, but numbers are so impersonal. So we gave them names and the way we do it, you want to have a real feeling of a group. So whoever finds the horses first, who documents them first, they are the ones to name them. This year, Travis and Claire got to name them, Jess here's got to name them. And then my husband, Chris, he went all the way out to the back country to get the trail cam and it took him like four hour hike. So he found winter. So he got to name her and she was named winter because she was born in the middle of winter, which is kind of rare, usually they're born in the spring. And so we make it a group effort, who gets to name the horses? There was some opposition in the beginnings, don't name wildlife, but you have to. How can you study an animal if you don't have a tag for them? So the pictures on the Facebook group, horses are very beautiful. They have unique, very attractive coloration. Is coloration of these horses, does it take on a life of its own? Or is it a standard or are you really can identify them quickly by their coloration? Yeah, we're very lucky because people who study wild horses, where they are all bays and blacks have a hard time telling them apart. In the 80s, a Pinto Clydesdale stallion called Milkman ran free with the wildies and he passed on his jeans because before that, like they've been wildies in the Ibex Valley since the Gold Rush days and they were mostly solids, but he left his Pinto jeans. So that's made it really easy for us to be able to identify the different horses and has made them very pretty. I watched a documentary on West American wild horses and horses can produce a fall every year so they can increase the population dramatically exponentially. But I guess is it because of the conditions are rougher here that we won't overload or produce too many horses, you know, a whitticle the same way as the bison in the Yukon. That's an issue. It depends where, like the backcountry horses, we only started studying them last year. We managed to get out there. They have the typical wildlife age distribution. So a lot of adult horses, very few young horses. We don't exactly know why yet. It could be because we had those two really hard winters and maybe conditions out there are harder. So the mares didn't carry to term or there may be a much higher rate of predation. And with the Alberta wildies, pole predation can be quite high, grizzly bears and wolves will take them. And the same might be happening with us in the backcountry, but we don't know enough yet. My guess is that the backcountry horses will never be an issue of overpopulation. But the highway horses, they live close enough to human habitation. People trap wolves in that area. And of course, any predator that comes close to settlements is most likely going to be shot. So there isn't the same predation predators, pressures along for the highway horses. And right now, in the last 10 years or so, there haven't been any roundups. So people have been shooting them. And that's what's been keeping their numbers in check. So moving forward, we don't quite know enough yet what will happen. So we have to monitor them. But if it shows that there is going to be a significant increase in horses, we're going to have to find ways now that shooting is illegal to keep their numbers in check. And there's two ways of doing that. One is with both control, they have a both control for wild horses that is used all over the world. And then there's also we could rehome young horses or do something because right in the current climate, it's not acceptable to shoot them, especially since you'll leave orphaned horses and you'll leave injured horses, because horses are difficult to kill. So it's unacceptable, shooting is just unacceptable anymore. So we have to find humane ways to manage them. And they are the main ways available. So I assume you're on a first name basis with many of the government men, people in white horses. Yeah, no, because the government is very reluctant to deal with the horses because it is such an incredibly complicated issue. There's people that love the horses, there's people that hate the horses, there's people every way in between. And because locals were shooting them, the government could just ignore the horses. But now we're trying to start building communication avenues with government because we're going to have to work together if we want to keep the horses and if we want to manage them humanely. This is where you come in to be a social media influencer because the way to make change in politics, of course, is to build a huge support group for the new way of thinking. And so you do that partially with trail cams because on your website, you can watch these trail cams. How many trail cams do you have out there at any one time? Well, right now I'm getting trail cams, all the trail cams together. And we did get to a fundraiser and we got a whole bunch of new ones to skip them all service. And I'm going to try and get more people involved with the field work because the more people we can have involved, the stronger group will be. Once I figured all that out, then we'll get, we have about 20 trail cams. It's a society now, you have a government regulated society, you have a structure and you have membership, can people become members or how does it work? We're still figuring things out. So in the infancy, we are wanting to keep the actual members who make decisions fairly small right now. So we invite people who we think will be really good. Eventually, of course, we'll have a society much like the animal shelter, Yukon Animal Shelter Society. But we're still in our infancy and we're still figuring things out. Do horses coordinate their births to coordinate with the spring like many other animals? Yes, most of our fools are born in late April, March and June, and no, late March, May and June is the prime time, but occasionally you'll get a mirror that'll produce a poll out of sync. Flame used to always have our foals in August and Sierra seems to have our foals in midwinter, which might be a plus if there's predation out there like major bear predation of foals, then maybe the only reason that she's had managed to have two foals in the last two years and the other mirrors haven't is because she's given both in the middle of winter when there's no bears. So it's all these questions come up like we don't know if that's what's happening. But that's what makes it so exciting because nobody's ever studied these horses before. And so there's always questions that come up and questions they have to try and figure out how to answer, it's like your explorers and it took me new land, it's a lot of fun. Do horses integrate with moose or deer or other ungulates or do they extirpate? All these different species, horses used to be one of the most common animals in the Yukon up to 4,000 years ago, and they've been in the Yukon from the 2 million years that had modern horses. They've been in the Yukon and in the north, it all depended, of course, when you had a major ice age and everything was covered in glaciers, you'd only have them say in the most northern corner where we had the Beringel plains, but then you had the interglacial and they'd move up, back up from the south and back down from the north. So they've been part of the Yukon for a very, very long time. The only difference that happened in the lost interglacial is we had human occupation. And a lot of animals that it was a tough time, the early interglacial times, because there was climate change happening, but they always survived until now, and humans were the only difference. So humans led to the extirpation of mammoths, elk and horses around 4,000 years ago. All these different species, the moose, the elk, the bison, they lived for hundreds of thousands of years with the horses. So that gave them a lot of time to figure out the individual niches, how to reduce competition to a minimum. Horses are actually more North American than the bison, the elk and the moose, because the bison, the elk and the moose, they originated in Eurasia, and they migrated across the landing the Bering land bridge into North America to become North American, whereas horses started evolving in North America 64 million years ago, the modern species appeared about 2 million years ago in North America. And then they migrated over the Bering land bridge into Eurasia. And they were hunted to extinction in America, at least as far as we know, even though they some claims that they survived in small pockets. In North, in Eurasia, they almost were hunted to extinction, but because of domestication, it saved them. And if they hadn't become domesticated, all horses would now be extinct. Wow. Oh, this has been, I have learned so much on this very interview, despite my reading so much on your, on your, on your website, on your Facebook page. Thank you so much for all your work doing this. You are, you are educating massively a number of people and, and once again, if people want to hear about Yukon Wild Horses, just sign up to the, to the Facebook group, this wonderful out. I really compliment you on the work you're doing, and it sounds like a mission. I think the, and it's really important that wild horses are here to stay. I never would have thought that even a year ago, but you've convinced me. Thank you so much for being on my show. Yes, they make the Yukon even more beautiful and the more interesting and more special. And it would be so sad if we lost them. They're part of our history and they re-introduce species. Well said. I hope, I don't go protect them and we'll have them for many years still to come. I went to the country to escape the noise and lights. I lay there in the pine cones all night. I woke in the morning and all the trees were gone. I got this sink and feeling, everything fell wrong. There were strip miles and dollar stores and diesel in the air.