A MOOR FAR AWAY WITH A LESSON CLOSE TO HOME

This year, the Dartmoor Hill Pony has become the centre of one of the most heated animal-welfare rows Britain has seen in a long time. More than 200,000 people have signed a petition to protect them, members of parliament have weighed in, and the prime minister has said the government will not support a cull.

It helps to be precise about exactly what the situation is, because the story is easily oversimplified on social media. First things first – no one has ordered the ponies to be killed. Natural England, the conservation body at the centre of the dispute, says it is not recommending a cull, has no power to order one, and values the ponies as conservation grazers. The ponies eat molinia, a coarse invasive grass that crowds out other plants and, when dry, fuels the wildfires that scarred the moor last year. On the science, the ponies are part of the solution.

However, as older grazing schemes end, ‘commoners’ who want the new funding must cut overall livestock numbers sharply, by as much as 89% on some land, according to campaigners. Ponies are now counted within those quotas, alongside cattle and sheep. Faced with a shrinking allowance for livestock and the current economic climate, a farming family will naturally tend to keep the commercially viable cow or sheep, and the pony, which earns almost nothing, is the one lost. A government-commissioned review had recommended that ponies not be lumped into the same calculations as livestock, and campaigners want that acted on.

So the threat actually comes down to numbers, money and a spreadsheet and that’s why it should be of interest to us here.

Heritage breeds rarely vanish by decree (thankfully!). They more often tend to fade when the structures around them stop rewarding their existence. A pony that does not pay its way, on land where every grazing slot carries a price, becomes a sentimental project not a sensible financial investment, and sentiment is the first thing to go when money is tight. Multiply that across enough farms and enough years, and a population that survived for millennia can slip below genetic viability within a generation.

That mechanism is universal, even where the exact details are not, which is what makes the situation worth considering in the SA setting.

We have our own heritage horses here. The Nooitgedachter is one of the few breeds South Africa can call entirely its own: sure-footed, level-headed, and built for our terrain and climate rather than a European arena. The Boerperd carries generations of local history, valued for its versatility, temperament and comfortable paces. The Basuto Pony itself, forged by the region’s mountains, long ago became a byword for endurance. These ponies are shaped by exactly the conditions our riders ride in.

Again, for clarity, this is not a rescue appeal, and we are making no claims here about how our local breeds are faring. Rather, the Dartmoor situation is a quiet reminder that the breeds which are uniquely ours are the easiest to take for granted.

A word on Warmbloods, here, because it’s important to note this. Most of us compete on Warmbloods or Warmblood types, and for good reason: they are bred to do exactly what modern dressage and showjumping demand, and they win because they are the right horse for the job. No one should feel guilty for choosing the horse that suits their sport. Yet a stable, a sport and a country are healthier for breadth. The Warmblood earns its place on merit, and so does the local breed, on a different set of merits: hardiness, soundness, an easy mind, and a constitution suited to African conditions rather than imported ones. Valuing one has never meant dismissing the other. In our view, the risk is not that we abandon our local horses overnight. It is that we stop thinking about them at all, until thinking about them is no longer an option.

Dartmoor’s Ponies may yet be saved. Whatever the outcome, the episode is a useful mirror: a breed can be loved by hundreds of thousands and still be edged toward the margins, not by cruelty, but by the slow arithmetic of what pays and what does not.