Difference between domestic and wild horses

Difference between domestic and wild horses

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
William Simpson has a mountain ranch in Northern California and has brought in wild horses to help mitigate wildfires. I was fascinated by his description of these animals and learned a great deal about the differences between domestic horses and wild horses.

My recent study, I took five years and I walk around with the wild horses, they see me as a symbiont now so I can walk up to a stallion and pull ticks off them. I'm actually going to start a tick study to look at the blood of these horses because these horses just don't get sick. They are so robust. I grew up with domestic horses of all different breeds on the ranch and found the tiniest little thing, they'd be down and go to the vet, come out. It's a thousand dollar bill. And that is all the inbreeding we've done with horses. And they went across the Aleutian Land Bridge from North America, where they evolved into Asia then Europe. Of course, man saw them as an opportunity for a tool and we bred them for different purposes. And through all that inbreeding, we lost a lot of that genetic vigor that these wild horses have, these horses are robust and they can take injuries like you can't believe and recover. They don't get sick. So what I want to do is a tick study where we start pulling ticks off these animals. We're going to send them in and start doing some blood analysis because they don't get Lyme disease. They don't get chronic wasting disease. I mean, the chronic wasting disease. That’s other problem we have, you've got to have a certain number of predators to sense the weak animals.

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