The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 224

The wild horse seems to have disappeared from the British Isles
around 9,000 years ago - some 2,000 years after the last ice sheets
retreated. 32 * Though hunting by humans doubtless accelerated its extinc-
tion, the horse was deprived of what was likely to have been its
favoured habitat - steppe grasslands - by the change in climate, which
allowed forests to spread. In other words, the horse died out here
soon after the lion 33 and the saiga antelope 34 and before the reindeer. 35
Though both horses and aurochs were intensively hunted, the aurochs
survived for much longer: until 3,500 years ago in Britain and into the
seventeenth century on the Continent. This is one of several lines of
evidence suggesting that climate change, not hunting, was the major
reason for the horse's disappearance. 36 Arguably, it no more belongs
to our native fauna under the current climate than the woolly mam-
moth does. The large herbivore which is missing from our ecosystem
is the moose or elk ( Alces alces ), which became extinct here a little under
4,000 years ago, largely as a result of hunting. 37 Moose are browsing
animals which live in and around forests.
But even if horses or cattle were replacing native plant eaters, the
absence of predators utterly changes the way in which they engage
with the ecosystem. The grazing regime imposed by conservationists in
upland Britain - whether they are using sheep, cattle, horses, yaks or
pushme-pullyous - bears no relationship to anything found in nature.
What we call nature conservation in some parts of the world is in
fact an effort to preserve the farming systems of former centuries. The
idealized landscape for many wildlife groups is the one that prevailed a
* There are two references to horse remains beyond this date in the archaeological
record. One, found in Kent and held by the Harrison Institute, is sometimes described
as being 8,000 years old. I checked with the institute: it appears that some people had
confused bc (Before Christ) with bp (Before Present). This institute tells me it has been
carbon-dated at around 9,760 years old. The other, a single tooth, was found in a Neo-
lithic tomb at Hazleton in Gloucestershire, which is some 5,700 years old. In
correspondence with myself and the biologist Clive Hambler, Robert Hedges, one of
the archaeologists who analysed the contents of the burial site, explains that the tooth
itself is undated and the notion that it originated at the same time as the tomb is 'an
unsupported possibility only'. It is possible that it was found and carried into the tomb
by Neolithic people. If horses had survived that long in Britain, one would expect to
see a good deal more fossil evidence, before they returned in domesticated form, later
in the Neolithic.