Did the wild horses survive the ice age?
In my introduction to the interview, I wrote that they did. But apparently there’s more than one way to define “survive.” According to Stillman’s new book, “Mustang,” a history of the wild horse in North America, the ancient horse flourished for millions of years in the Mojave Desert, surviving the ice age by crossing the Bering land bridge to Russia. The descendants of these horses then returned to the Americas in the 1500s, brought by European settlers. That sounds like survival to me. If I survive a house fire, it means I lived through it–it doesn’t mean I stood in the flames. A reader writing under the username Montana1990 agreed with me, pointing out that “North America is the original home of the horse species.” Other commenters weren’t so sure. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal wrote that “wild horses are not native to this continent, and as such have no natural controls short of starvation when the population outstrips its habitat.” BLM Deputy Director Henri Bisson took the same l
