WHEN A HERITAGE BREED BECOMES INCONVENIENT

What Dartmoor teaches us about valuing our own.

If you have never stood on Dartmoor, picture a high, windblown moor in the southwest of England, and scattered across it, in small family groups, semi-wild ponies that have grazed that ground for thousands of years. They are tough, low-set and unbothered by weather that sends everything else looking for shelter. This year, they have become the subject of one of the most heated animal-welfare rows Britain has seen in a long while.

More than 200,000 people have signed a petition to protect the Dartmoor Hill Pony, whose breeding population now sits at just under a thousand. The campaign has drawn in members of parliament from across the political divide, and even the Prime Minister has said the government will not support a cull. To anyone watching from South Africa, it might look like a peculiarly British storm in a peculiarly British teacup. But if we look a little closer, it’s worth learning some lessons from the situation in the UK right now.

What is actually happening

It is worth being precise here, because the story is easy to oversimplify, and the truth is more tangled than the headlines suggest.

No one has ordered the ponies killed. Natural England, the government conservation body at the centre of the dispute, has said plainly that it is not recommending a cull, that it has no power to order one, and that it values the part ponies play in keeping the moor healthy. The ponies are, after all, conservation grazers. They eat molinia, a coarse, invasive grass that crowds out other plants and, when it dries, fuels wildfires like the one that burned through more than a thousand acres of Dartmoor last year. On the science, the ponies are part of the solution, not the problem.

The fear is subtler than a cull, and that is exactly what makes it instructive. As the older grazing schemes come to an end this summer, commoners who want to qualify for the new public funding will need to cut overall livestock numbers sharply, by as much as 89% on some land, according to the campaigners’ reading of the contracts. Crucially, ponies are now counted within those overall quotas, alongside cattle and sheep. When a farming family has to choose which animals to keep within a shrinking allowance, the commercially viable cow or sheep tends to win, and the pony, which earns its keeper almost nothing, is the one quietly taken off the moor.

A Defra-commissioned review of Dartmoor had specifically recommended that ponies not be lumped into the same stocking calculations as cattle and sheep, and that decisions avoid driving pony numbers down. Campaigners, including the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association and the Friends of the Dartmoor Hill Pony, want that recommendation acted on, and warn that warm words from politicians have not yet become anything concrete.

In this case, then, the threat comes from a spreadsheet of numbers and the consequence of those numbers for farmers trying to manage in a difficult economic climate.

How heritage breeds really disappear

Breeds rarely vanish by decree (thankfully!). However, they do fade out when the structures around them no longer reward their existence. A pony that does not ‘pay its way’ on land where every grazing slot now carries a price, means that farmers need to be sentimental about the ponies, rather than use economic sense. Sadly, in these times in the UK, sentiment is not going to carry anyone very far. Multiply that single decision across enough farms and enough seasons, and a population that survived for millennia can slip below the point of genetic viability within a generation.

The Dartmoor campaigners make this case well. Their argument is that the right animal, in the place it has adapted to over thousands of years, is not a luxury but a working tool: for biodiversity, for fire prevention, for a functioning landscape. They look at the bigger picture, and in this context, the short-term economic savings, would remove something cannot easily be replaced once lost.

That is the thread worth pulling for a South African reader, because the mechanism is universal even where the specifics of the situation are clearly not.

Closer to home

We have our own heritage horses, and they deserve rather more than a fond, occasional nod.

The Nooitgedachter, for instance, is one of the very few breeds South Africa can call entirely its own. Sure-footed, level-headed and built for our terrain and our climate rather than for a European arena, it is a horse shaped by this country. The Boerperd carries generations of local history in its bloodlines, valued for its versatility, temperament, and the comfort of its paces. The Basuto pony itself, forged by the mountains of the region, long ago became a byword for endurance and toughness. These animals are not museum pieces. They are animals shaped by precisely the conditions our riders actually ride in.

To be clear, this article is in no way a rescue appeal, and it makes no claim about how our breeds are faring one way or the other. Rather, prompted by a moor in the home country of our Editor, it is a reminder that the breeds which are uniquely ours are the easiest of all to take for granted, precisely because they ask so little of us and demand so little attention.

The Warmblood question

Most of us who compete do so on Warmbloods or Warmblood types, and for good reason. They are bred, with extraordinary care and over many generations, to do exactly what modern dressage and showjumping demand, and they win because they are the right fit for that particular job. No one should feel a flicker of guilt for choosing the horse that suits their sport!

However, a stable, a sport and a country are all the 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, a willingness to turn its hoof to almost any discipline or terrain, and a constitution suited to African conditions rather than imported ones. Valuing the one has never required dismissing the other. The real risk is not that we will all suddenly abandon our local horses overnight. It is that we will simply stop thinking about them at all, until the day when thinking about them is no longer an option.

The lesson from the moor

Dartmoor’s ponies may yet be saved. The politics are still moving, the pressure is real, and a great many people are determined not to let them go, but whatever the outcome, the episode serves as a useful reminder. It shows how a breed can be loved by hundreds of thousands of people and still be edged toward the margins, not by cruelty or by any single villain, but by the slow, quiet arithmetic of what pays and what does not.

Our own breeds are not on a moor, and they are not in anyone’s headlines, which is exactly why they are worth a deliberate thought now, while the choice to value them remains entirely ours to make.