Wild horses
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
I don't think I've ever seen any wild horses in the wild. The thought of mustangs always are in the back of my mind whenever we're driving in remote regions of the West, and I once thought I might have seen some in the Owyhee Desert in southwest Idaho, but they were probably too close to a ranch house and definitely too well fed to be the real thing. The same is true with a string of horses I saw along side a dirt road in western Queensland. I like to think of them as brumbies, but I'm sure they weren't.
In fact, the only mustangs I've seen running loose were east and south of Cassoday, but even though there were thousands of horses occupying tens of thousands of acres, they were there as government guests behind fences in the Flint Hills, not free-running in the open ranges of the Great Basin. They were, however, an impressive sight.
For the past three or so years my wife and I have helped drive cattle that my son and his wife have pastured east of Cassoday down to the headquarters of Shadow Valley Ranch, a route that takes us through a couple of pastures filled with mustangs. It's quite a sight to see the mustangs swirling this way and that when they see us moving through their territory. Our riding horses invariably get fidgety at the sight of the mustangs, but whether it's from envy or apprehension I don't know.
Neither mustangs nor brumbies, however, are true wild horses; they are feral, domestic horses that have gone wild. Their ancestors were wild, but were domesticated some 6,000 years ago. All the domesticized horses in the world, from Shetland ponies to Belgian draft horses, are one species: Equus caballus.
Today the only extant true wild horse is Equus Przewalski, a native of the steppes of central Asia. Pronounced zhe-VAL-ski (the p is silent), the P-horse (as it is generally called, not surprisingly) is named after the Russian explorer and geographer who first discovered them in 1879.
Of course he didn't really discover them. The Mongols, who called them "takhi," had lived among and hunted them for centuries. But even these intrepid horsemen, perhaps the best the world has ever known, were not able to domesticate them.
By the 1960s the Przewalski was extinct in the wild, although several hundred were being kept in zoos around the world. I remember back in the 1970s taking our kids to the zoo in Topeka and seeing a pair of takhi. They are a small tan-colored horse with a large ear, a dorsal stripe, and a stubby mane, like a mule's. The ones in Topeka looked a whole lot like Rebel, our kid horse, who was undoubtedly as ornery and independent-minded as his wild cousins.
About 15 years ago some wildlife biologists from Holland began an effort to repopulate Mongolia with Przewalskis. In 1992 they released a small herd into a national park in the Altai Mountains west of Ulan Bator, the capital. Later other groups were released in two locations in the Gobi Desert in the western part of the country. Thus far the project has been successful, with the initial herd now in its fifth Mongolian-born generation. Overall there are some 300 head in the three herds.
I hope the Przewalski will again prosper on the Mongolian plains. It's easy to create mustangs — just turn a few domestic mares loose with a stud horse and let them go feral for a few generations. But the Przewalski, once extinct, would be gone forever.
