The pony that still wears a brand

Every October, on the commons above Exmoor, farmers bring their herds in from open moorland for a morning that has kept roughly the same shape for a century. Mares and foals are driven off the hill into a pen at the home farm. The year's foals are looked over, and any that meet the breed standard are marked, while still restrained, with a hot iron — a four-pointed star burned into the near shoulder, the herd's own number on the near hindquarter.

It is worth saying plainly how unusual that is. Hot branding of livestock has been phased out across Britain on welfare grounds for almost everything else that's farmed. It survives here, deliberately, for one specific reason: nobody has found another way to identify a pony that may spend its whole life on open moorland and may not be caught again before the day, if ever, it's sold off the hill.

A wartime bottleneck

Exmoor was Crown land until 1818, a royal forest in the old sense of a hunting ground rather than woodland, and the ponies on it belonged in practice to whoever held the wardenship. When the forest was sold that year, the outgoing warden, Sir Thomas Acland, took thirty ponies he judged to be of the old type to neighbouring land at Ashway Side and bred them as a closed herd, while the buyer, John Knight, crossed the ponies he'd acquired with Arabians and Thoroughbreds to make them bigger. Today's registered Exmoor descends from Acland's thirty, not Knight's crosses. The Exmoor Pony Society was founded in 1921 to keep that type recognisable, and closed its stud book to outside blood in 1962.

The nearest the breed came to disappearing altogether wasn't the sale of the forest. It was the Second World War. Exmoor was used as a training ground, and ponies were stolen for the wartime horsemeat trade; a few, by the Society's own account, were used for target practice. By 1945 the Society's own figure for what was left on the moor is about fifty ponies. In 1948, two of them were sent to London Zoo for the specific purpose of telling the public that number. A small group of breeders spent the years afterward rebuilding the herds from what remained — Mary Etherington among them, who took ponies to Edinburgh and bred from them at the Royal Dick Veterinary School.

That bottleneck is not just a historical footnote. A 2013 genome study of modern horse breeds found the Exmoor carrying one of the highest inbreeding coefficients recorded in any of them — a direct, measurable legacy of fifty animals having to become the whole breed.

Why the moor makes identification a different problem

Most of what's written about native breed conservation is about the studbook: who's registered, who's related to whom, which matings are recommended. The Exmoor has that layer too. But it also has a second, more immediate identification problem that few other British breeds face in the same form, because of where a working share of the breed actually lives.

The ponies still running free on Exmoor are not owned collectively. They belong to individual moorland farmers, each holding grazing rights on a particular common, and because the land is unfenced, more than one farmer's herd can run on the same ground — the Society's own account gives examples of three herds sharing a single common. A pony found injured, or one that strays, or one that's been illegally dumped on the moor by someone hoping to be rid of it cheaply, needs to be traceable to an owner by a person looking at it from a distance, with no realistic way of approaching close enough to scan a chip. That is the specific problem the brand solves, and the reason the exemption exists: a 2012 report in the Somerset County Gazette on the Society's position summed it up in its headline — branding, for a moorland pony, is "the only way."

What changed, and what didn't

Until 2009, every purebred registered Exmoor was hot-branded, whether it was moorland-born or raised in a paddock. Once microchipping became a workable, verifiable alternative, breeders who kept their ponies in fields rather than on open moor stopped branding, and Britain's welfare rules soon after ended routine hot branding of livestock outright — with an exemption written in for semi-feral ponies, on the reasoning that there is still no other workable way to identify, at a distance, an animal that may not be handled again between one autumn gathering and the next.

The Exmoor Pony Society, notably, has not simply taken the easiest version of that exemption. It holds a derogation from DEFRA that would let a moorland foal leave the moor on a passport application without ever being microchipped at all. Its own considered position, since June 2009, has been that every foal should be chipped as well as branded — a step beyond what the exemption requires it to do, taken purely so that a bloodline is never lost for the sake of a step the Society could afford to take. It's the same instinct we described in what a stallion's licence actually proves: a body doing more than the regulatory floor requires, because it understands what the paperwork is actually supposed to protect, and because a document only proves what the process behind it was rigorous enough to check.

A pony that meets the breed standard at inspection is entered into Section 1 of the stud book and issued a buff-coloured passport. One that doesn't — or hasn't yet been put forward for inspection — goes into Section X with a blue passport, and stays there: eligible to be shown in its own classes, recommended against for breeding, but never struck out of the book altogether. No pony of known parentage is excluded. That, too, is a choice a small, genetically narrow breed has to make deliberately, in the same way the Fell and Dales pony societies chose to keep FIS carriers in the breeding pool rather than remove a share of the breed's diversity along with the disease.

What the numbers still say

The Exmoor sits in the Priority category of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust's 2026–27 watchlist — the Trust's highest level of concern. The Society's own figures put roughly 500 registered ponies across about twenty free-living herds within Exmoor National Park, and a further 3,500 or so bred in-ground across the UK and abroad: around 4,000 in total, of which the Society itself estimates only about 600 form the active breeding population. That is the same shape of problem we set out in what an effective population size actually tells you — a headcount in the thousands can still describe a breed with very little room left to manoeuvre, when most of those thousands aren't breeding, and the ones that are all trace back to the same few dozen animals.

What the herds are for now

What has done the most for the Exmoor's prospects lately has comparatively little to do with the show ring. The same hardiness that let the breed survive the moor on sparse grazing turns out to be exactly what a nature reserve wants from a grazing animal: an Exmoor will eat coarse vegetation that sheep and modern horses leave alone, without needing supplementary winter feed. The Moorland Mousie Trust, set up in 2000 largely to fund the gelding and training of colts for which the moor itself has limited use, now places close to 300 ponies across more than sixty conservation grazing sites around Britain, managing heathland and chalk grassland that would otherwise scrub over.

In January 2015, fourteen Exmoor ponies bred within the National Park were sent to Milovice, a former Soviet military base in the Czech Republic, specifically to graze it back toward something closer to natural grassland. None of that work required the ponies to be shown, ridden, or bred for anything except themselves — which, for a breed this genetically narrow, is closer to the actual point than it might first sound.

The narrower thing a brand proves

A brand burned into a shoulder is, on the face of it, the least modern identification method a breeder could choose — the opposite of a laminated passport or a microchip number matched against a database. On Exmoor it has survived for the plainest possible reason: it's the only one of the three that still works when nobody can get close enough to check the other two. We've written before about what a horse passport actually proves and what a stallion's licence proves. A brand, at its best, proves something narrower still — which farmer's herd this particular pony belongs to, read from a gate, by someone who was never going to catch it to find out any other way.

That isn't nostalgia. It's identification built to fit the animal and the ground it lives on, rather than the other way round — which is the standard we'd like every part of a listing, ours included, to be held to.

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Sources

• Conservation of the Exmoor Pony — The Exmoor Pony Society
• Exmoor Pony — Rare Breeds Survival Trust, 2026–27 Watchlist
• Petersen, J.L. et al., "Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data", PLOS One, 2013
• "Exmoor pony branding 'the only way'", Somerset County Gazette, 2012
• Environmental Grazing — Moorland Mousie Trust / Exmoor Pony Centre
• Exmoor pony — Wikipedia, for the wartime and Milovice history

— Rene