The Tarpan and Takhi
Przewalski's Horses; image courtesy of Susanna Forrest
The story of two proposed subspecies of wild horse, the Tarpan of the western Eurasian steppes and the Takhi of the eastern steppes, is a saga of colonialism, scientific advances and nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of racial purity and “breed”, in which the wild horse came to be defined and redefined both taxonomically and culturally. The question of what exactly a wild horse is has been reformulated and posed repeatedly. Today this concern is not only central to debates about rewilding, but also to our understanding of what ‘wild’ means in relation to the identity of perhaps the most highly managed equine ‘breed’ alive today.