PONIES OF THE WILD

Independent Magazine, February 2001

At last year's Labour Conference, John Prescott said he would give the New Forest to the Nation as a National Park. When I went down there in the autumn, through rainy yellow leaves and deep mud to a remote pony round-up - called, in Forest terminology, a pony drift - I asked the people standing around as the wild ponies floated and snorted and stamped suspiciously into the corral, what they all thought of that idea.

"It isn't his to give."
"They ought to know the Forest themselves, before they interfere."
"We've looked after this Forest a thousand years. No one's saying we do it bad. It's our life. Anyone can come in. If they made it a National Park, people who don't know it would run it. They'd spoil the wildness."
"They'd make it commercial."
"They'd add recreational facilities."
"He hasn't thought of the effect on local people," said one man on the gate. "We want to keep it wild, like the ponies. For everyone. We want to keep it as it is."
"As it always was, " said a wet sad woman in a green mac, holding a hurdle for a skittish mare and foal.

When twenty ponies were packed in, they were checked over and wormed, and the foals were branded. It happens every year. These are wild animals; squealing, suspicious and eddying, angry, afraid. They don't meet your eyes. Branding them sounds violent but only took three seconds - iron to skin, hold it, and away - and seemed not to hurt. The foals objected far more to the Wormer, squirted in the side of the mouth. One reared furiously.

"If this is the contact they have with people", I said to the woman next me, "it won't make them like us much."
"We don't want them to," she said. "Then they'll stay away from cars and not get killed."

The forest is still monitored (despite John Prescott) by the Verderers, a judicial Court based in Lyndhurst, Hamphsire. Their by-laws have regulated Commoning in the Forest since the Normans.

"What is Commoning?" I asked Sue Westwood, the Verderers' Clerk, when I phoned to get permission to attend.

"Grazing animals in the Forest," she said. "William the Conqueror gave some peasants grazing rights here. Today, absoutely anyone occupying land, even a housing estate in Southampton, which ever had that right, can graze animals here. The Verderers employ five Agisters to check the ponies over for the Commoners."

Funny how when you plunge into the English countryside you tangle at once with English history too. The Commoners standing round me owned these ponies; but they don't know them, rarely see them, and sell the colts for a pittance for the good of the breed. As I watched, the fillies and mares were released into the Forest again. Only a hundred and fifty stallions join the three thousand Forest mares. The best colts go back too, but for the rest it's the gelding knife and the autumn sales.

"Welfare organizations check the sales," Sue said. "Our foals are fine then; but dealers drive them to northern sales, keep them in lorries ten days: when they're sold again they're in a terrible state. Southall Market is particularly bad."

"We'd like to sell them as riding ponies," one of the Agisters told me. "But it's a constant struggle. There is a market, but we're not allowed to sell to it. Europe loves our ponies, but we can't export them."
"Why?"

"The meat thing. We want to maintain the breed. If we could sell to Europe, good ones for riding, poor ones for meat, that'd help everyone. Don't get me wrong: it's right there should be pressure groups, but it's silly to be sentimental over eating pony,not cow. If someone had headcollared a cow two thousand years ago, we'd watch the Derby run by Charolais and eat pony steak. No BSE, totally organic. People ate pony in the War."

The New Forest, in fact, is the most mixed pony of all surviving British breeds, and Britain is the only place in the world with so many different feral ponies.

Horses have been the mark of the aristocrat in every Western culture since archaic Athens. "Man, a little lost on the elephant," says the French poet Francis Ponge, " is seen to his advantage on the horse, a throne truly to his measure". Ponies are low, ponies are poor; they belong with peasants and criminals, like those in the "Smugglers' Song" in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill:

Five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark
Brandy for the Parson, baccy for the clerk,
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!

France gave classy, sophisticated terminology - dressage, haut école, to the aristocratic art of horsemanship. But ever since the Ice Age isolated us from Europe, Britain has specialized in horses of low école.

The English monarchy had it in for lowness. Henry VIII wanted bigger and bigger horses, for cavalry, transport, and testosteronic showing-off . He fined people who bred foals under thirteen hands. But this ban on smallness was also a class war. A 1740 Act to end "racing with poneys", aimed to stamp out "a vile and paltry breed of horse, and remove temptation from the lower class of people who constantly attend these races - to the great loss of time and hindrance of labour".

Then, in the twentieth century, low became beautiful. Thelwell cartoons sum up pony appeal: this is the tangly, cheeky diminutive version of something very powerful. Everyone fell in love with the vernacular, the demotic, the small. Ponies were written up as hardier and cannier than horses; they refused, clever little things, to the stupid noble dangerous things we ask of horses, like running the Grand National. Ponies had uncanny knowledge of the land they came from. Ponies belonged to the earth. In Tolkein, the hobbit ponies are sure-footed, rough and sturdy as the hobbit-heroes. In Elizabeth Goudge's 1946 fable Little White Horse, the pony Periwinkle is "named after the flower that grows close to the earth, called by country people Joy-of-the-Ground." As with "the Little Folk", earth-wisdom seems more concentrated in something that has dwindled.

And ponies were democratic. One painting that made headlines from the Thirties and Forties "Ashington Group" of pitmen painters (Northumberland's answer to Alfred Wallis), was A.F. Whinnom's "Pit Ponies, Sunday Morning", in which ponies rest above their reflections in a pond. In Jimmy Floyd's "Bait Time", a blinkered pony in the shafts steps over trolley rails in the tunnel to a miner holding out sandwiches. Fred Laidler's "Dead Pony" lies crumpled in an underground trolley.

Underground was the opposite of everything ponies evolved to be. The records begin in the 1700s. By 1914, there were 70,000 working pit-ponies, often with backs rubbed raw by tunnel roofs and feet crippled by potsholes. But they knew their ground. If it was unsafe they refused to move. Gradually the numbers dwindled until, in 1994, British Coal's last ponies, Flax, Carl, Alan and Tom, departed from Ellington Pit, Northumberland.

The Polo Pony was their upper-class opposite: a manufactured pony that began in the 1870s. In 1869, the 10th Hussars returned from India with a new game. Instead of making horses taller, breeders suddenly had to give them the turning-circle of a London taxi , and thought of the paltry nags Henry had spurned. The British wild breeds were small, but could carry a man. Between 1890 and 1924 ten different pony breed Societies sprouted up, reflecting many changing values: interest in evolution and genetics; awareness of the wild as Britain grew less wild; sharpening regional consciousness, and - since ponies are bracketed with children - deeper interest in children's experience, children's interests. Commercially, they were driven by the desire to breed sturdy, breed nimble, for Polo.

Some British ponies were already extinct before Polo breeders plundered their genes. Lincolnshire Fen Ponies, when the Fens were drained; Cornish Goonhillies, Irish Hobbies and Scottish Galloways were absorbed in other breeds. But there were (and still are, just nine left: Irish Connemara, Welsh Mountain, Scottish Highland and Shetland; Dales and Fell from the north; Exmoor , Dartmoor and New Forest.

Where did they come from?

In her poem "DNA", U.A. Fanthorpe says they descended from horses turned loose by King Arthur's disbanded knights:

Their horses, the noble destriers,
The lordly ones, plaited and groomed and oiled,
With their grave names and their alarming harness,
Who carried nothing, except men to war,
Stepped mildly over the brambles, tasted grass,
Cantered composedly through the fresh waste
Of early England, and at last
Went where they liked, quick and shining,
Through kingdoms. Time whittled them down.
They became the dwarfish ponies of now,
Shaggy and hungry, living on the edge.

 

Pony fossils, if you put them beside a few of the world's living wild horses, tell a different story.

In the "Dawn" Period (Eocene, fifty-five million years ago), little Eohippus, the Dawn Horse, multi-toed and fox-sized, scampered through the jungles eating leaves. Fifty-four million years later, the environment was no longer jungly swamp but plains with a brand new vegetation, grass. Eohippus had become Equus Caballus, a large, one-toed species spreading into South America, Asia, Europe, Africa. Then the Ice Age destroyed the land bridges and on each continent the species specialized. Ten thousand years ago, Equus became extinct in the American continent where it evolved. No one knows why. Elsewhere, it developed into four types. In Europe and western Asia, a horse; in Africa, a donkey in the north, a zebra or quagga in the south; in the Middle East, an onager, the wild ass of the Bible.

On rich grass, Equus got bigger; on mountain grass, small and hardy. And its horse examples subdivided into four more types. The Asiatic Wild Horse, like the Przewalski of Mongolia, rediscovered wild in the Gobi Desert in 1887 and bred back in captivity. Przewalskis look exactly like prehistoric cave-paintings at Lascaux, have two more chromosomes than horses, and something like them once lived all the way from central Asia down to France. A herd of twelve was recently released in the Cevennes, forty miles from Lascaux. The chunky but extinct Forest Horse was the ancestor of all carthorses. The Tundra Pony, from north east Siberia, is the Shetland's likely forebear. And the Tarpan, a small, mouse-grey customer, once lived all over Europe, joined by oriental horses when the Romans brought them into Gaul. The white Camargue horses came from Roman Arabs, running wild in France.

Most horses probably descended from the Tarpan. For Britain, the most important direction they evolved was the Celtic Pony, which evolved five thousand years ago in north west Europe, and arrived here before our last land bridge disintegrated into the Scilly Isles, round 1500 BC. After that, no outside change happened to pony populations here until the big ships of the Vikings, Phoenicians and Romans brought in larger oriental breeds.

Hippologists can only guess how our breeds developed out of this mix. Shetlands, with amazing strength relative to their tiny size and prominent nasal cavities which warm freezing air before it enters the lungs , came from Scandinavia, probably from the primitive Tundra. They thrive on rough grazing; tundra metabolism can't handle lushness. Other Northern ponies, Highland, Dales and Fell, were also affected by Viking imports. Yet Highlands still have primitive markings and many are coloured like the Przewalski, dun with dark mane, tail and dorsal stripe. Some have zebra leg stripes, just like horses in the Lascaux caves.

The Connemara has Andalucian blood, for sixteenth-century Galway merchants imported Spanish horses. Yet in the peat bogs, horse skulls from the early Pleistecene age when Ireland had no domestic horses, suggest there was already a Celtic original. The Welsh Mountain may have Celtic Pony ancestry, but the chiselled little face shows the influence of oriental Roman imports.

All these flourish as domestically bred ponies. Even when they "live wild" they are used to people. The problems come when ponies live as the wild animals they began as. With political and economic questions about managing the place they do it in. We have to fund them to mistrust us. The problems are all about English moors, English forest.

If the New Forest is struggling, it's worse in the west, where traditional owners are today's tragedy: the farmers. Fifty years ago, the pony population on Dartmoor was twenty thousand. Now it is under two thousand. For two thousand years these ponies have lived wild among granite tors, bogs, mist and snow, epitomizing pony mystique: the small survivor, wild knowing product of a tough environment. They carried grown men hunting and gave blood to the Polo Pony; but may be extinct in the wild in five years. They nearly became extinct this spring, with the threat of slaughter because of Foot and Mouth - which they can't catch but can spread.

Ponies have long been a buyer's market. Even before this disastrous epidemic, they fetched less than a pound; farmers couldn't even sell them as petfood. They shoot them when they can't afford to keep them. "Better than shunting them from auction to auction," said the Secretary of the Dartmoor Livestock Protection Society. "They end up as petfood anyway, but many collapse in lorries."

Yet imaginatively, at least, even Dartmoors have some of what it takes to survive today. The key to pony economics, as to pop music, is girl appeal. Think small, think children. And with horses, for whatever subliminal sexual reasons, this mostly means girls.

Just look at Prunella on Guzzle
The weirdest pony on earth
Why doesn't she slacken his muzzle
And tighten the breech in his girth?

(John Betjeman, "Hunter Trials".)

Today's Prunella has treacherously abandoned poor Guzzle. As a New Forest Agister said, "Girls today want Arabs: the horse equivalent of David Beckham." They express this yearning for even in horse-trading games on the Internet. Dartmoors are pretty. Fine-cut little faces, darkly delicate legs. One fourteen-year old I know is running a stud of virtual Dartmoors with Australian web-pals; but not even the most dedicated fantasist has dreamed up a virtual Exmoor.

Yet over in Lorna Doone country, which never had the Ice Age, is the real thing: a little wild horse which can be tamed fine, but whose body is genuinely primitive.

Exmoors are a totally weatherproofed pony, and possibly the only pure-blooded wild horse left. They have a light-coloured muzzle, the "mealy nose" of cave-paintings, a "snow chute" of short hairs above the tail to run the rain off, and an extra rim of protective flesh round the eye (the "toad eye"). Their foals have woolly undercoats. Mealy noses and undercoats happen in other feral breeds and are a mark of the primitive. Alaskan bones two million years old match the Exmoor's jaw-structure, which alone among horses shows the beginning of a seventh molar. Bones like those of modern Exmoors but a hundred thousand years old have been found in the Mendip Caves. Archaeology suggests that Exmoors pulled Bronze Age chariots. They turn up in the Bayeux Tapestry; on the British side.

But Exmoors are rarer in the wild today than Giant Pandas. There are about eleven or twelve thousand Exmoors worldwide. The wild breeding numbers are under 400.

In "DNA", Fanthorpe glimpsed a lost Arthurian nobility in British ponies:

Sometimes, in a foal's crest, you can see
Some long-extinguished breeding. So in us,
The high-rise people and the dispossessed..,
Something sometimes reverts to the fine dangerous strain
Of Galahad the high prince, Lancelot the undefeated,
Arthur the king.

But all those mealy muzzles are signs of something else - of primitive survival in the wild. Of that typically pony knowingness of place, as crucial to survival as "The Knowledge" to London taxis. It is this that has to be handed on. In the New Forest, I asked if the ponies kept gorse down by eating it. "They nibble young shoots," said Sue, "not the prickles. The mares teach foals. A stable-bred pony wouldn't know how."

Poland has reconstituted a herd of primitive Tarpans, France gave 600 acres of the Cevennes to twelve Przewalskis; but Britain, home of wild poniness, is losing the Exmoor and Dartmoor. Not their genes, but their wildness; that knowledge of place bred in them before the Ice Age.

And also bred in people who share their terrain. Those New Forest Commoners were doing what they've done for a thousand years. They spend their time and money (and I didn't see much of that around) caring for ponies they never ride and don't even recognize. What's the point? What good is a wild animal?

As animal psychologist Jeffrey Masson says, it depends what you mean by good. Good for you and me, to hunt, eat or photograph, is a pathetic answer. For the owners on Dartmoor and Exmoor, the good of the ponies is that they are wild where they always have been, enjoying the life they evolved to live.

What is the point of wildness? It is is great as an idea. The problems start with its relation to the rest of us. That's one reason a countryside ruled from a city is an increasingly hot political issue. Especially where diminutives are involved; where there's little space.

It's hard to be wild on an island.