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There are no such things as "wild" horses


Still Waters

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There are no such things as "wild" horses anymore.

Research published in Science today overturns a long-held assumption that Przewalski's horses, native to the Eurasian steppes, are the last wild horse species on Earth. Instead, phylogenetic analysis shows Przewalski's horses are feral, descended from the earliest-known instance of horse domestication by the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago.

Further, the new paper finds that modern domesticated horses didn't descend from the Botai horses, an assumption previously held by many scientists.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-redraws-family-tree-domesticated-wild.html

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Domesticated vs wild vs feral are weird descriptives to use about horses. If I find a wild horse and train it, it's domesticated. If that horse runs off and lives in the wild again it's feral. If it finds another horse and reproduces, it's offspring are wild. Same for ancient horses. The horses on the Steppes were wild, til they were caught and ridden around, then let go to breed, then they were feral and when they reproduced the offspring were wild, repeat cycle. To say all horses aren't wild because at one point they were caught and ridden doesn't mean every horse after that was domesticated.

Horses in the Americas before they died out here are genetically identical to modern horses. Those American horses were never domesticated, they migrated over the land bridge and what populations were left here died out. We have the same debate here in the US because the horses brought over by Europeans are now known to be genetically identical to the horses that originated here. Now they are designated as feral, despite generations of them living wild. One of the arguments used to get rid of wild horses is saying their are a non native species. Well that cannot be argued anymore they are technically a reintroduced species not unlike wolves. 

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Running wild ... never running free ...

~

 

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