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A horse’s tale

Horses aren't usually the stuff of geopolitical maneuvering. Yes, there have been some famous and famously political horses. The favorite horse of Caligula, the notorious Roman emperor, reached the peak of the equine political heap when Caligula discussed making him a Roman consul.

 

A horse of a different color has caught the eye of people living in Britain, Germany, and Poland for thousands of years, and their interest has left the animal with a long and checkered history that intertwines with our own. The story of the Tarpan horse trots alongside that of our own peaks and valleys, and ends in a marshland in England.

 

Tarpan horses once roamed wild over the British Isles, serving their purpose in the ecosystem through light grazing of marshy areas. They were particularly suited to marshlands with their large flat hooves that gave them support in boggy areas, and their descendants lose their hooves every spring and grow new ones, reducing infection. Their presence meant that the marshes remained perfectly grazed, with space left for marsh plants, such as reeds, to grow well and for marsh animals—including bitterns and godwits and the water vole—an ecosystem that could support them.

 

Naturally, given their importance in the natural balance, the horses came to an end during the Neolithic period, hunted to extinction in Britain a few thousand years ago. Despite their disappearance from the islands, however, they persisted in central Europe, especially Poland, through the 19^th century, until these remnants also vanished.

 

In the interim, legends grew around these horses as central figures in epics about the Teutonic Knights, a military-religious order of the 13^th and 14^th centuries. These Roman-Catholic knights wore white coats with black crosses that were very similar to the Iron Cross the Germans used as insignia in World War I.  The folk tales of the Teutonic Knights included heavy reference to their perfectly bred, powerful horses. Tarpans have a distinctive coloring and build. Although they are not tall animals, their skulls are relatively large, and they sport a tawny body with stripes on their backs, with a dark mane, tail, and "socks."

 

When the horses finally disappeared from Poland in the 19^th century, they weren't really gone for good because their genes lingered in hybrids throughout the countryside. Observant Poles noticed that some mares could produce a horse that looked a lot like the legendary Tarpans, and they began breeding a new version of the animal. Although they were successful, their efforts came to a halt with the onset of World War II, when the Nazis turned their eyes on these descendents of the Tarpans, which the Polish had called Koniks (pony in Polish).

 

The Nazis took the animals and attempted to produced a genetically "perfect" race of the breed, hoping to re-create the magnificent animals of Teutonic Knight legend for use as Nazi parade horses. What ended up happening was that after the Germans lost the war, the starving citizens of Munich and Berlin ate the animals out of desperation.

 

At that point, the English wouldn't have minded taking a few of the remaining animals scattered around Europe for their own, but the Iron Curtain fell over Communist Europe, preventing the friendly relationships that require such transactions. Not until the Berlin Wall fell could people with more ecological interests finally obtain some of the animals and try to use them to restore acres of Britain's wetlands.

 

Their first efforts have already met with success. The horses were turned loose on a 150-acre area of marshland that had been destroyed by excavation for building materials. In their relatively brief tenure on the land, the returned Tarpan descendents have lived natural horse lives, grazing on their natural foods and helping to return the marshlands to their natural states. It's a pretty happy ending for a breed that has, for the past several hundred years, followed a rather unnatural path back home.

 

This piece appeared in Biology Digest.

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