Wild Horse Profile
Wild horses are known for their dignity, power and grace. Dignity is one of those things that horses, like cats, have only until they get spooked by something like a cucumber, and even their power comes into question sometimes.
Mick Jagger only weighs around 68kg and an unspecified number of these animals were famously incapable of removing him (or so he claims), but others made it onto the wall of fame in French cave paintings of animals we loved in the Stone age, so there must be something to them.
What little we know about wild horses is a bit muddied by the long-standing domestication of the animals which makes it hard to know whether the ones we dig up are truly wild horses, feral escapees, or strange hybrids, but recent reintroductions are shedding new light on a once-prevalent species.
Wild Horse Facts Overview
| Habitat: | Forest, steppe, plains |
| Location: | Europe, Eurasia |
| Lifespan: | Unknown |
| Size: | Around 163 cm (64 inches) |
| Weight: | Around 300 kg (660 lb) |
| Colour: | Varied, black to palamino |
| Diet: | Grasses |
| Predators: | Humans, large Pleistocene predators |
| Top Speed: | Fast |
| No. of Species: | Unknown, likely 1 |
| Conservation Status: | Reintroduced, Endangered (IUCN) |
Wild horses existed long before humans entered their world. Multiple species would have spanned vast territories across the Palaeolithic steppe when our ancestors first migrated through the Eurasian landmass.
Sadly, all but one is dead, and the one we have left is in such short supply, we still have a lot to learn about it. The good news is that it’s a successful reintroduction, and the populations are on the rise.
With more examples like this, we may one day see large herbivores return to their old stomping grounds all over the world.
Interesting Wild Horse Facts
1. Feral vs Wild
The feral child in Mad Max 2 was pretty wild in the colloquial sense, but when dealing with species, there’s an important distinction between one that is wild, and one that just escaped the confines of its parents or captors.
The two aren’t entirely exclusive, however; you can have farmed wild boars, for example, like the ones that escaped and set up a feral population in the UK. These are wild in the sense they haven’t been very domesticated, and they’re feral too, because they set up a community after escaping.
But in general, the term ‘wild’ refers to a non-domestic animal that didn’t escape from captivity. And this is particularly important when talking about horses because there are quite a few feral populations all over the world – the horse has been domesticated for thousands of years, so has had plenty of time to escape on numerous occasions.
Horses are also very tough animals, so they do well as escapees – able to fight off large predators and feed themselves, and, demonstrably, find one another to reproduce.
So, when we talk about the wild horse, we’re talking about a species of horse that was likely abundant in the Copper Age and was a rougher, tougher (necessarily smarter) ancestor of modern horses. 1
2. The Tarpan
There were once free-ranging horses in the Eurasian steppe, thought to be a subspecies of the wild horse, but it’s unclear whether they were pure breeds, or mixed with domestic feral horses. Unfortunately, the last one died in the Russian Empire in 1909, and nobody’s sure what exactly they were.
Since then, back-breeding has been attempted, but this is a bit of a fool’s errand without the genetic data to compare the result to, and having only the phenotype to refer to for accuracy. But this is how we ended up with the heck horse, which sounds like the steed of a Midwestern villain in a Christian cartoon, but was named after the Heck brothers: the German zoologist siblings who bred the race.
Two tarpan subspecies have been suggested, one in the forest and one on the steppe, but nobody can agree on anything other than what the last one looked like. It was about 1.5 meters at the shoulder with a thick mane, a dorsal stripe, and shoulder stripes.
Fortunately, there is genetic stock still available for the species, and some very clever people managed to get it put back where it belongs. 2
3. Some have been reintroduced
One subspecies did survive in captivity, though it went extinct in the wild, and had recently been reintroduced. With fewer than 150 mature individuals it enters the world as a critically endangered species, which is actually a significant step up from extinction, so in this context, that’s a good thing.
In Mongolia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe in the ‘90s, the Przewalski’s horse finally made its way back into the wild.
DNA analyses on this subspecies have given researchers some insight into the lineage of wild horses, and suggest they diverged from domestic horses around 160,000 years ago, but there’s still a bit of conflicting information in regard to this.
From archaeological excavations, it appears that the Bronze Age Botai people from Central Asia would have used these wild horses, and perhaps domesticated some of them to a degree, something which would set the age of horse domestication back by 1000 years in modern records.
This certainly means that the genetic line of the wild horses around today has been affected by human interference, but this domestication was short-lived and may have only had a negligible effect on the physical traits of the horse.
Still, this was (at least) a different subspecies than modern domestic horses (they don’t even have the same number of chromosomes), and there’s no sign that Przewalski’s horse contributes genetically to the common domesticated horse line. 3
4. They might be a different species
As of now, the wild horse is still considered by many a subspecies of the same species as the domestic horse, Equus ferus, and reported as E. ferus przewalskii. But there’s a good argument to be made for it to be considered its own species, and some taxonomists do just that.
Taxonomists, being the argumentative type, refuse to agree on which side is right, so we’re going to do it for them. Wild horses have earned their name! As an internationally recognized authority on the topic, we declare them E. przewalskii.
5. They became extinct in the 20th Century
Wild horses, whatever they are, were once widespread across Europe and Asia. They show up in some of the oldest cave paintings in France and would have made formidable opponents to prehistoric human hunters.
Much like the Europeans of 2013, Paleolithic Europeans would have eaten horses for lunch and dinner – though they probably did it on purpose – and when agriculture popped up, horses would have become not only a food source but a pest and eradicated accordingly.
Like the majority of large herbivores on Earth, humans wiped out horse populations in Europe, and by the 19th century, they were barely holding on. By the end of 1969, the last wild individual was dead. 4
6. We still don’t know much about them
Having so few individuals in the wild, and those being reintroduced so recently, it’s hard to discern anything concrete about their wild behaviour or social groups.
Animals have culture, whether we care to admit it or not, and throwing a bunch of captive-reared animals into a wild environment will not give you an accurate reflection of what was there before. These creatures will have to find their social and ecological role in the wild, and with any luck, their instincts will guide them well until they do.
Horses are notoriously adaptable and tough animals, so it’s no surprise that this species is increasing steadily in the wild. And reintroductions like this are so important for the future of our planet.
7. Large mammals need to come back
Recently, researchers discovered that humans and their farm animals make up 96% of the Earth’s mammalian biomass. To put it another way, four species (humans, cows, pigs, sheep) are almost all that’s left in the mammalian order across the planet.
This horrifying statistic represents the unchecked and inefficient expansion of humanity across the globe, and it’s not without its repercussions.
It’s been shown time and time again that large mammals have the potential to reverse climate change, and their removal has certainly accelerated it.
Successful reintroductions of large herbivores like the wild horse give conservationists and hopeful animal bloggers alike a chance to push this concept a little harder, and promote organisations like Rewilding Europe, who need as much support as they can get to bring much-needed biodiversity back to our landscapes.
Animals do more than keep us company, they sequester carbon in the ground, recycle nutrients into increasingly deteriorating soils, and form buffers against the detrimental effects of human consumption.
Horses in Europe once helped humans thrive with their lean, high-protein meat throughout the Stone Age; they pulled our ploughs and chauffeured our traders from town to town as societies developed; and tens of thousands of them died with our great-grandparents in the trenches, helping create one of the greatest periods of stability in the history of mankind.
Now they can help us yet again by providing a healthy ecosystem for us all to share, and all we have to do is let them. 5
Wild Horse Fact-File Summary
Scientific Classification
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Perissodactyla |
| Family: | Equidae |
| Genus: | Equus |
| Species: | Przewalskii |
Fact Sources & References
- “Wild or Feral?”, Wild Horse Education.
- “TARPAN HORSES”, Oklahoma State University.
- Allison N. Lau (2008), “Horse Domestication and Conservation Genetics of Przewalski’s Horse Inferred from Sex Chromosomal and Autosomal Sequences”, Oxford Academic.
- “Equus ferus przewalskii”, Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.
- Tim Vernimmen (2022), “Counterintuitive: Large wild herbivores may help slow climate change”, Mongabay.