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A Sundre man is being hailed as a hero after the dramatic rescue of a wild foal that was stranded on the edge of a cliff on the weekend.
Debbie McGauran, a volunteer with Help Alberta Wildies Society (HAWS), an organization that works to protect wild horses in the area, happened to be in the area with her 12-year-old grandson and caught the tense moments on video.
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“My grandson and I decided to go out and see if we could see some wild horses … And they tend to congregate in that specific area, along the Coal Camp Road,” she said.
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McGauran’s grandson saw a mare on the hill, just standing there. “And he says, ‘She’s got a foal, and it’s stuck and it’s in trouble.’
“I got out to get a better look and then I started to film it, and then I saw it roll down and I thought, ‘oh my God.’ And I’m looking at the cliff and I can’t scale that; I’m not physically capable,” she said.
The video then shows Dustin Kyle pulling up and seeing the foal in distress.
“The next thing you know, he’s scaling the side of the mountain, and then he goes down toward it,” McGauran said. “The foal rolled down and got caught in some branches, and it was only like a foot or two away from the very edge of the cliff and really steep.
“The mare backs up a bit, and you can see the earth crumbling under her feet and then falling down the cliffside — her footing wasn’t that great, either. At that moment, any one of the three of them could have fallen,” McGauran said.
The video shows Kyle yelling at the mare, prompting the animal to back up. Grabbing the foal by the legs, he drags it away from the cliff’s edge to more solid ground and hoists it up onto its feet.
While Kyle is doing this, the foal starts clacking in submission, McGauran said.
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“He (Kyle) backs away and then the mare slowly, as he retreats, comes in and she touches noses with her foal, and then turns around and goes back up the steep mountain, and the foal follows.”
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Darrell Glover, president of HAWS, said there is no question what would have happened had Kyle not stepped in. “That foal would have died right there, right in those branches; the mare had no way of actually pulling it out of that position.”
Glover said that in the 10 years that HAWS has been doing rescues, this was the most “precarious” position for a foal. “It was definitely on top of the list for the most difficult rescues.
“Our mission since we started was to promote awareness, and this is exactly the kind of awareness that we need to get more people out there taking pictures. If not for that, people wouldn’t be here noticing that foal was in distress,” Glover said.
Glover said this was a perfect ending — nobody got hurt, and the foal is alive and back with mom.
“We’ve had other horses die from that cliff; we normally find them dead at the bottom. So, that was a very, very lucky foal,” he said.
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