The Exmoor pony's real brush with extinction wasn't in the Ice Age — it was in 1945
The Exmoor Pony Society's own history page tells a deep-history story — ponies reaching Britain from Alaska, a breed with thirty thousand years alongside man — that does not entirely hold together under its own evidence.
The Exmoor Pony Society's own history page makes a striking claim: that the first wild ponies reached Britain from Alaska around 130,000 years ago, and elsewhere on the same page that the breed has shared "perhaps thirty thousand years with man." Neither figure is sourced, and the two don't sit easily together even on the Society's own account. What is documented is more modest, and on its own terms still a good story. Ponies on Exmoor appear in the Domesday Book of 1086, recorded as the property of the Crown and untaxed for that reason. Roman-era carvings found in Somerset show chariot ponies of a similar build. And in 1818, Sir Thomas Acland took thirty ponies "of the old type" onto Ashway Side on the moor — a closed herd that, as far as the written record goes, is the direct foundation of the pony registered today. Whether the breed is a genuine wild survivor or a very old feral-domestic type is a question genetics hasn't settled either way. The herd Acland closed in 1818 is the part of the story that doesn't need embellishing.
The collapse that nearly ended it
If the ancient history is mostly legend, the modern near-extinction is well documented and far more recent than most people assume. During the Second World War, with owners away and the moor's boundary gates left open, ponies were shot at by troops training on Exmoor and stolen for the wartime horsemeat trade. The Society's own account puts the postwar population at perhaps no more than fifty animals — a bottleneck inside living memory, not deep prehistory, and of exactly the kind that matters more than raw numbers suggest, in the way we wrote about in why rare breeds don't breed the carriers out. Mary Etherington is credited, by the Society and by outside accounts alike, as the breeder who did the unglamorous work of rebuilding afterwards: restoring the moor's cattle grids so herds could be contained again, and coordinating what remained of the breed back into something that could be bred forward. It is a much less romantic story than the Alaska claim, and a far better-attested one — in miniature, not unlike the Otterhound's story, which we wrote about in August: a breed's real crisis turning out to be recent, specific and survivable, rather than the slow ancient drift its own legend prefers. The Otterhound didn't decline.
What's left, and which number to believe
The current population is where the sourcing gets genuinely difficult, and it's worth saying so rather than quoting one figure as though it were settled. The Exmoor Pony Society's own conservation page puts about twenty free-living herds and roughly five hundred ponies still on the moor itself, with a further three and a half thousand or so registered elsewhere in the UK and abroad — call it around four thousand worldwide. The Society also classes the breed as Rare Breeds Survival Trust Watchlist Category 2, "Endangered." The most commonly cited outside reference gives a UK figure of under a hundred and places the breed in the RBST's top concern tier, "Priority," which is a materially different picture. The two don't agree, and as the breed's own body, holding the stud book and the branding records, the Society's figures are the ones we'd weight more heavily — but a breed this small is exactly the case where it matters to show the disagreement rather than pick whichever number reads better.
Built for the coat, not the show ring
Three traits turn up in every serious account of the breed, and all three are functional rather than decorative. A "mealy," oatmeal-coloured patch around the eyes, muzzle and underbelly is one of the oldest primitive markings a pony can carry. A raised ridge of flesh above and below the eye — the "toad eye" — channels rain and snow away rather than into it. And a fan of short, coarse hairs at the top of the tail, which the Society calls a "snow chute," sheds water off the body in exactly the place a less adapted breed would hold it. None of this reads as show-ring polish. All of it reads as a pony built to survive a winter on an exposed moor without help, which — four decades on from a bottleneck of perhaps fifty animals — is still roughly the job the breed is doing.
If you breed Exmoor ponies, or sit on the Society's committee, and would rather we worked from your own current figures than from a page that may be out of date, the address is info@genovaq.co.uk.
Sources
- History of the Exmoor Pony — Exmoor Pony Society
- Conservation of the Exmoor Pony — Exmoor Pony Society
- "Exmoor pony", Wikipedia
— Rene
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