Wild horses, majestic and fiery animals, evoke freedom and pride in all of us, and images of wild herds galloping with manes blowing in the wind come to mind in infinite landscapes, but today we don't there are so many to travel through the desert immensities.
Indeed, the threat posed by humans has forced them to limit their existence to arid areas where the lack of food and water and the conditions make their survival very difficult.
Within what we call wild horses, there are three main types: wild horses, semi-wild horses and truly wild horses. In this article on our site, we are going to explain the difference between the types of wild horses that exist.
The wild or feral horses
The wild horses are the wild horses that are in nature today and that belong to a country or a state. Feral horses are descendants of horses domesticated by man that managed to escape or were intentionally released and managed to survive and reproduce.
The most famous feral wild horses are the mustangs of America, the brumbies of Australia, and the Namib desert horse:
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The mustangos are the horses of the American West that cowboys try to tame during rodeos, these emblematic horses descend from thehorses of the Spanish conquerors of the sixteenth century. They have traits of Arabian, Hispano-Arab, and Andalusian horses. Some escaped and have returned to their wild way of life, reproducing and spreading on the continent until the nineteenth century when they were 2 millions. The winners saw these horses as a threat to their performance, accused them of stealing grass from their cattle and began to exterminate them. By the 1960s, the population of mustangs in the American West had drastically decreased. Concerned about the extinction of mustangs, the United States Congress passed a law in 1971 to protect them, today it is estimated that the population of mustangs in the United States is
between 40 and 80,000 horses
- The Namib desert horses are descended from horses brought by the Germansat the end of the nineteenth century, when they colonize the Namib Desert, in Nambia, one of the most arid regions in the world. In 1914 South Africa invaded the Namib Desert region and the colonized ethnic groups freed themselves from the Germans and the horses were left alone, without caretakers. They survive thanks to an oasis in the desert. The conditions: heat, drought, sand winds, scarcity of food and water make life very hard for these wild horses: today the wild horses of the Namib desert are about 300 horses and almost half of the foals die during their first year of life.
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The brumbies are the wild horses of Australia, they were imported by Europeans in the nineteenth century, but around the same timehorses begin to be replaced by machines whenever possible: then the horses were either put on pasture or went to the slaughterhouse for consumption. Many of those put on pasture were abandoned and returned to the wild. Horses quickly adapted to the warm climate of Northern Australia and began to breed and spread to more areas of Australia, with time due to lack of food and consanguineous crosses suffered physical changes, today they are
small horses that measure a maximum of about 150 cm at the height of the withers, frequently with a chestnut or black coat. A few years ago they became so numerous that farmers accused them of damaging their plantations and began organizing helicopter hunts killing entire herds of brumbies with carbines. The Australian government does not consider brumbies to be endangered and has not created any laws to protect them.
The semi-feral horses
Semi-feral or free-roaming horses: these are horses that live freely in herds in large areas but in realitybelong to a horse breeder Within the wild horses of the semi-feral type we find the pottokas of the Basque Country, ponies of about 120 centimeters, the purebred animals are black. They live freely in areas of the Spanish and French Basque Country.
The Camargue horse is also a semi-feral horse: it is a gray horse that lives in the delta areas of the Rhône river, in the south of France, they were already in this region before the arrival of the Romans. They live freely but belong to breeders who use them mainly for parties with Camargue bulls.
The “truly wild” horses
Wild horses proper, they don't exist today: they were completely wild horse species that had never been domesticated by humans. They were the Przewalski horse and the Tarpan, they are considered the ancestors of domesticated horses:
- The Przewalski's horse lived for many years in the steppes of central Asia unknown to our civilization until in 1878 the Russian colonel Nikolaï Przewalski brings back from Mongolia the skin of an unknown equid: the West then discovers Przewalski's horse, a truly wild horse, never tamed by man. But the curiosity caused by the discovery of the Przewalski horse will be the cause of its disappearance: the herds of Przewalski horses are displaced and put in captivity, hunting and the extension of agriculture finished decimating the Przewalski horse. Today the survivors of this species only exist in captivity: there are a few thousand scattered in zoos.
- The tarpan, a horse from the steppes of West Asia and Central Europe, disappeared completely: the last tarpan died in captivity at the end of the nineteenth century It was a small horse, as tall as a pony at about 130 centimeters, usually gray in color. It was largely exterminated by peasants, today a local breed of pony from Poland: the konik breed has some characteristics of the tarpan, but although it resembles the tarpan, the konik will never have the characteristics of the wild horse.
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