Disappearing Przewalskis, a 1943 train journey from the Eastern Front to Berlin, and a “Fascist leader” called Baumgarten: my unfinished wild-horse chase

One day when I hadn’t yet started working on The Age of the Horse, I was at a National Trust property in England, vaguely on the trail of a woman who fascinated me and whose story I had researched but was unsure how to tell. I was trying to find a work-around for the limitations …

Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 3500BCE–1828

I’ve just published a chapter called “Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 1828–2018” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Routledge, 2020). I went overboard writing this and outstripped my word count so …

Whole Heap of Little Horse Links

A young Scottish showjumper who’s only been riding for three years has been sponsored by Euromillions lottery winners. (Horse and Hound) Meanwhile a nineteen-year-old started a millionaire’s fund of his own when he became the youngest ever winner of the showjumping CN International via Karen K. (Spruce Meadows) Corrective surgery for thoroughbred yearlings before auction. …

New Study Reveals More About Origins of Domestic Horse

Ahem. I am now going to attempt to write a simple account of the findings of a new study into the genetic origins of domestic horses. I’m doing this as much for my benefit as for yours. Hopefully my brother will step in in the comments if I’ve got it all wrong. Now. Horses. This …

Hunting Horses

Geoff Nicholson sent me a snippet from an interview with German director Werner Herzog on his new 3D documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. In the film, Herzog explores the Paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche, a fine-drawn menagerie that includes horses, rhinos, big cats and mammoths. Yesterday in the library I was …

Takhi Games

I filmed these Przewalski horses making the most of the long winter we had from 2009 to 2010 in West Berlin Zoo, bucking and farting with a vengeance. Hopefully they will get a chance to transfer out of that tiny field and to the new nature reserve outside the city at Doebritzer-Heide.