wild and feral are used interchangeably in today's vernacular, but it appears these truly are wild (as in undomesticated, the opposite of your dog). How cool!
From my understanding, exactly how "wild" these horses are is mildly controversial, with some claiming that they have a non-trivial amount of domesticated horse ancestry.
From Wikipedia:
>Przewalski's horse was formally described as a novel species in 1881 by Ivan Semyonovich Polyakov. The taxonomic position of Przewalski's horse remains controversial, and no consensus exists about whether it is a full species (as Equus przewalskii); a subspecies of Equus ferus the wild horse (as Equus ferus przewalskii in trinomial nomenclature, along with two other subspecies, the domestic horse E. f. caballus, and the extinct tarpan E. f. ferus); or even a subpopulation of the domestic horse.[6][7][8] The American Society of Mammalogists considers the Przewalski's horse and the tarpan both to be subspecies of Equus ferus, and classifies the domestic horse as a separate species, Equus caballus.[9]
Both of these terms are much easier to say than "Przewalski" which probably attracted the headline writer. And a reader is less likely to confuse these wild horses with escapees from an oligarch's zoo or somesuch.
In my understanding feral is a domesticated creature that has found it self adapting back to the wild, while a wild creature was never domesticated at all. How can pigeons be feral?
There are over 300 pigeon/dove species, and nearly all of these are wild and have never been domesticated.
However, when people say "pigeon" without specifying a particular species, they are almost always referring to feral rock doves (Columba livia domestica) commonly found in urban environments all over the world.
Multiple types of Pigeons(/doves) have been domesticated through history. The pigeons most people are familiar with in big cities are feral domesticated rock doves.
Originally, eight horses had been scheduled to travel, said Mašek, but one horse sat down before the flight from Prague and had to be unloaded and returned to Prague zoo... These horses have to stand for the entire journey – they can’t sit down.
30 hours on their feet on a flight seems almost unbelievable, I can understand why #8 wanted to take a seat at the beginning.
For a horse, that's not so unpleasant in itself - their legs are able to 'lock' in place. Some horses will voluntarily choose to be on their feet for that amount of time anyway (not that I've watched any individual for long enough to personally vouch for this!) and are able to sleep standing up too. This is common to all equids, these Przewalski's horses included. Being stuck in a shipping container with no view for 30 hours though, that's another thing entirely...
Horses mostly stand and occasionally lie down, but they do not naturally sit. If a horse sits (except very briefly in the transition between lying and standing), it can indicate that something is physically wrong with it.
More recent research [0] suggests that the Botai horses are Przewalski horses that were hunted, not domesticated.
The apparent bit damage is explainable by natural wear. Also, the age/sex distribution of the horse remains don't fit with what you would expect from a domestic herd, none of them showed signs of having been ridden, some had been shot with arrows, and the evidence of horses having been kept in pens and horse milk stored for consumption was weaker than first thought.
A horse can travel about 30 miles a day, and by the sounds of thing, this 30 hour trip was about 1600 miles. Does that mean they could ride/guide the horses back in about 2 months?
Presumably these undomesticated (idk to what degree, I think they've interbred with domestic horses) horses are not generally interested in being ridden. Besides I'm guessing 30 hours of known issues might be more attractive and/or cheaper than 2 months of unknown issues.
That's weird. I was there 20ish years ago and ran into a group of (what seemed to my untrained eye) wild horses when I was hiking in the Tien-shan mountains.
For a similar comparison, wild horses do surprisingly well in some desert regions of the Southwest US. It's a surprising treat to see a healthy herd of horses meandering through Joshua Trees. They can apparently do pretty well on sparse grasses and shrubs.
Those horse populations do well enough that the BLM regularly kills some off to limit the numbers. Ostensibly it's to protect the environment, but given the number of legal and illegal cattle that's allowed to graze on those same public lands I think the culling is mostly at the behest of ranchers.
"Do surprisingly well" depends on your expectations I guess. Yes, it can be a treat to see a healthy herd. It's much less a treat to see emaciated, dehydrated horses, which are not that uncommon:
and while one can argue about the "true" motivations of the people arguing for culling/control, it's absolute true that conservation organizations think that feral horses are bad for the environment:
Wild horses in North America are a very interesting question.
All equids evolved in North America. For tens of millions of years they were here, and only have been gone for ~10,000 years until being reintroduced by the spanish. [1]
[1] See the fantastic book "Twilight of the Mammoths"
The same that they eat in Chornobyl. Everything that is green except traffic lights.
This animal are the equivalent to "Eurasian zebras" and was designed to roam around in arid places. They are really hard and able to fend for themselves, even under high predatory pressure and radioactivity levels.
Yes, and little else. A lot of it is land with short grasses as well although that varies by region. I guess I am surprised it would be enough for horses nutritionally.
It was enough for mongol/kereit/naiman/turcik horses (eastern steppe horses?). Of the 5 snouts, only the horse could rely on grass only without peas or roots, which made it the king of the 5, everybody knew how to take care of a horse, even semi-nomad clans had 2 to 3 per adult.
Didn’t those people all domesticate horses? I would think they may have farmed grains to feed the horses. And these introduced horses are meant to be wild.
