SUNDRE - A Sundre man is being hailed as a “wild horse hero,” after coming to the rescue of a foal on a steep embankment west of Sundre on Sunday.
The May 26 rescue was caught on video.
Darrell Glover with Help Alberta Wildies Society said his colleague Debbie De Dutch and her grandson Dustin Lyle were passing by the "the cliffs" at Panther River when they saw a foal slip down a steep embankment as a mare stood by helplessly.
“These are the same cliffs that we’ve lost many horses to in the past. It’s a very steep drop,” Glover says in a video voiceover of De Dutch’s filming of the rescue. “(The foal’s) future was certain to be death if not for Dustin, this brave fella that climbed up over the hill here and rescued this foal. This is just heart-stopping.”
Video courtesy of Debbie De Dutch/Help Alberta Wildies Society:
The video shows Lyle making his way to the foal on the steep embankment, waving his arms to try and keep the mare away and eventually grabs the foal by its legs and drags it up the hill away from the edge.
Glover said it was unlikely the mare would have hurt Lyle.
He gets the foal back up on its feet on a less steep part of the embankment and leaves it as the mare stands in the distance.
The mare makes its ways to foal and then guides it down the embankment to the bottom where the rest of the band of wild horses are grazing.
Had people not been going by, Glover said it absolutely would have led to a disaster.
“He’s the typical hero when he says he’s no hero,” Glover told the Albertan, adding Lyle said he merely did what needed to be done.
