Sometimes it’s a race for survival out in the Animal Kingdom, and this particular race was quite the spectacle.
Back in 2023, a trail camera caught a band of horses and their young foals running away from a sizable-yet-speedy grizzly bear. The footage was shared by the Help Alberta Wildies Society, a non-profit organization that advocates for protection of wild horses. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much they could do to protect this grouping of horses with a grizzly bear closing in.
In case you didn’t know, grizzly bears – though they might look a little “chunky” – can run like the wind. They are the fastest of the eight bear species, and have been known to top out at a speed of 35 miles per hour. Believe it or not, that’s around the same speed that wild horses gallop along at. It’s clear in the trail camera footage linked below that there wasn’t much of a difference in speed, and that the grizzly was slowly-but-surely closing in.
The trail camera set up along the Canadian Rocky Mountains caught this scary, high-speed chase a couple of years ago. The clip first starts by showing the wild horse band – being comprised of about nine adults along with a couple of young foals mixed in – running through a creek just after dawn. After they all go out of frame, a grizzly bear can be seen closely and scarily in hot pursuit… passing by the same camera (and utilizing the bridge over the water) only seconds later.
The Help Alberta Wildies Society wasn’t ever able to officially confirm how that high-stakes chase played out, but they assumed that some of the foals that were running along in the group didn’t make it. Predators like the grizzly bear in the video typically try to single out the young animals from the pack. If the herd/band doesn’t try to protect the youngling, like these wild horses did when a wolf tried to pick on one of their offspring, then the predator can usually succeed in taking advantage of the inexperienced and often slower prey.
Based upon how the wildlife society captioned this post, it certainly seems like at least one of the foals in the clip didn’t make it. However, the Help Alberta Wildies Society spun it into somewhat of a positive message, saying that hunts like these that naturally happen out in the wild are why government intervention with population control can be unnecessary.
With most foals being born in the early spring (between February and the end of March), they’re trying to get their argument out there that nature balances itself out and intervention of any kind can just be more harmful than anything:
“This 2023 Grizzly chase will remind us what we will once again be seeing in just a month or two. Many of the sub-adult wild horses that we counted this past week, will not make it till June. The overall counts will be reduced and then replaced by 2025 foals. Then… how many of those will perish?
Let’s keep it real and understand why we do not need any government intervention.”
