IT IS UNLIKELY that there are any truly wild horses anywhere in the world today. During the Pleistocene era, right up until ten thousand years ago – when the human experiment in agriculture first began – wild equids proliferated in Asia, the Americas and Africa. In the modern world, however, only seven of these species survive: the African wild ass (Equus africanus), Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus), Kiang (Equus kiang), Grevy's zebra (Equus grevyi), mountain zebra (Equus zebra), plains zebra (Equus burchellii) and Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus przewalskii). Yet a new one has come into being: the domestic horse (Equus caballus). While this recent arrival flourishes, five of the eight surviving species are ‘vulnerable’, ‘endangered’ or even ‘extinct in the wild’. Przewalski's horse, which was once found in the remoteness of the Altai Mountains in the Dzungarian Basin and Chinese Turkestan, probably no longer exists in its pure state, having been diluted with herds of semi-feral horses. It exists nowhere in the wild; the last was a solitary stallion spotted in the Mongolian Desert in 1969. The immense herds of ostensibly ‘wild horses’ of the western United States, Australian desert, and South American llanos and pampas are really the feral descendants of sometime domestic stock. The ‘wild horse’ nomenclature is revealing: ‘mustang’ is from the Castilian mesteño, meaning belonging to ‘everyone or nobody’. The worth of such ‘wild horses’ in the Americas fluctuated from very valuable to utterly valueless, as human needs varied over time. This offers a sharp contrast to the history of horses in southern Africa, where horses have never thrived as a feral population and, equally, were never without considerable worth. In southern Africa, generally speaking, a horse had an owner: there were no vast ‘wild horse’ herds able to live freely on their own terms.

Tellingly, even mustangs imported during the South African War (1899– 1902) were immediately tamed for military use and later sold to South African farmers. Indeed, in vivid contrast to the herds of the American West, wild horses in southern Africa are anomalous – small, isolated groups which, because of their scarcity, have inspired local myths and followings. For example, in the 1920s there were wild, shaggy horses with ‘long, flowing manes and tails’ on the islands at the mouth of the Orange River.