A foal that found itself stuck in the Kananaskis River would have been in big trouble, had paddlers Anna Gleig and Ava Haddad not come by.
The two were making their way down the Kananaksis River on July 12 when they came across a group of horses along the bank.
Haddad told CBC News one horse walking along the shoreline suddenly entered the river in front of their boat.
“We were kind of freaking out there, because there’s a massive horse that’s just in the water stopping us from continuing on,” said Haddad, who lives in the Calgary area.
“And then we look to our right and there’s this baby horse … pinned against the concrete part of the bridge, that is unable to move or get out.”
Gleig, a Canmore resident, said the mother horse was “quite panicked” as the depth of the water prevented her from reaching her foal.
Gleig and Haddad, both students of the University of Calgary’s environmental science program, knew they couldn’t leave the young animal there.
“We went forward and decided we need to save this foal,” Haddad said.
Foal rescued from river
They dragged the boat up to the shore before venturing back into the water, scaring off the adult horses in the process.
Rescuing the foal was a team effort, with Gleig grabbing it while Haddad paddled.
“Somehow we were able to drag him across the the river stream, back to the the safer bank,” said Gleig.
“He’s maybe like 80, 90 pounds, less than a week old,” she said. “So still a big animal, but very small for a horse.”
Luckily for the foal, there was a former lifeguard onboard.
“I’ve been a lifeguard, and I spent a lot of time in the river, so it was kind of using that sort of training,” Gleig said.
Haddad said the rescue was a success, with the foal co-operating fully.
“He didn’t fight back against us,” she said. “He just let us take him, so that worked out really well.”
Now that it was rescued, a new problem arose: the adult horses, including the foal’s mother, had been scared off during the rescue effort.
“We were stuck with him, without his mom or anything,” Gleig said. “We tried to leave him in the sun, hoping that the mom would come back if we weren’t there, but we ended up waiting on that shoreside for about an hour and a half, and they never ended up coming back.”
Every time they tried to paddle away without the foal in the hopes its mother would return, “he would hop straight back into the water, which was not ideal,” said Gleig.
“I think he just didn’t want to be left alone, which was really sweet, but made it a little bit more complicated for us.”
Determined to keep the foal safe, the pair took matters into their own hands.
“I ended up putting my life-jacket on him and picking him up and putting him in the boat with us,” said Gleig. “And miraculously, somehow he was calm enough, and was OK with being in the boat.
The pair paddled downstream with the foal for about 20 minutes.
“He took a little nap there because he was just so tired,” Gleig said.
As the two tried to figure out what to do, Gleig was able to get a hold of somebody from the nearby Mînî Thnî community.
The man who arrived to the scene recognized the horses solely from photos he was shown.
“The guy knew exactly what herd [the foal] was from because we showed him photos … he came, picked [the foal] up, put him in the back of his pickup truck and drove him back,” Gleig said.
Afterwards, the foal was successfully reunited with its mother, the pair said.
The man “said he found the mom and reunited them, which was really good,” Gleig said.
“It was a good ending, which made it a good day,” she said.
Haddad was happy the two were able to help the foal.
“He has this second chance at life,” she said. “If we weren’t there, he probably wouldn’t be here today.”
