In Search of the Wild Horse
The word 'wild' carries many romantic and ethologically misleading associations. To break the bad news right upfront: to look for something 'wild' in horses, you have first to digest our domestication driven past with these animals. And what you're left is not much of wild representatives of this old species.
There are countless histories waiting to be told in which horses play a major role: the story of technology, of transport, agriculture, energy, war and urbanization. But alongside these ‘physical’ histories of the material world, other less tangible histories jostle for attention: stories of knowledge, ideas and concepts, stories of art and symbolism.
by Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse. A Cultural History, 2015Most free‐ranging horses are feral horses (i.e. descendants of domesticated horses that escaped from intensive human management). An exception is the Przewalski horse (Equus przewalski). These horses were, until recently, considered a separate species from domestic horses (Equus caballus) due to anatomical and genetic differences.
Przewalski horses became extinct in their natural habitat in the 1950s, but from a small nucleus of 13 foundation animals (one of which was a hybrid with the domestic horse), they survive today in captivity and in successfully re‐introduced free‐ranging populations (e.g. in Mongolia).
