Truly wild horses are rare today. But in India, small populations of feral horses, believed to be descendants of domestic horses, have made the wild their home.
One such population can still be spotted in Dibru Saikhowa National Park in the northeastern state of Assam. According to a November 2024 Mongabay India report by contributor Nabarun Guha, feral horses have lived there for nearly 80 years, moving about on open grassy river flats and woodlands in herds of three to 15 individuals.
Their origin isn’t clear, but one hypothesis is that they’re descended from horses that British and U.S. troops left behind after World War II.
“The feral horses found here [now] are the third or fourth generation of those horses. However, there is no written record to support this theory,” K.N. Das, a forest official at Tinsukia Wildlife Division, which manages Dibru Saikhowa, told Mongabay India.
Environmentalist Anwaruddin Choudhury suggested the feral horses are descendants of cart horses used for carrying goods during the war. After the Indian people who brought them to Tinsukia returned to their hometowns after the war, the horses migrated to the nearby forests of Dibru Saikhowa, Choudhury said.
A third theory, suggested by tour operator and environmentalist Niranta Gohain, is that Dibru Saikhowa’s horses are descendants of Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii), considered the only known living wild horse species, native to Central Asia’s steppes.
While Dibru Saikhowa’s feral horses call the wild their home, they aren’t considered “wild animals,” and thus lack legal protection, Guha writes. Regular surveys of the population haven’t been conducted either, although the last census from seven years ago found there were about 400 horses, forest official Das said.
Shamikhu Changmai, who mapped the habitat of feral horses in Dibru Saikhowa in 2021, told Mongabay India he estimates there may be 150-200 horses in the park now.
The future of the feral horses is uncertain due to habitat loss, floods and trafficking, Guha writes.
Dibru Saikhowa is bordered by rivers on three sides, and “every year, quite a few horses are swept away in the floods,” Changmai said. Floods also erode the open areas the horses favor, and domestic cattle from nearby villages compete with them for grazing land.
There have been occasional cases of smuggling too, Guha writes. In February 2020, forest officials intercepted a truck in Tinsukia district carrying six smuggled feral horses, later released back into Dibru Saikhowa. The trafficking was linked to a high-ranking Indian military officer who gave riding lessons in Guwahati.
Another population of feral horses lives in Point Calimere Wildlife Sanctuary in southern India. The horses there are considered to be a nonnative competitor to an endemic antelope, the blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra).
Read “The last feral horses of India” by Nabarun Guha for Mongabay India.
Banner image of feral horses by Dhruba Jyoti Baruah via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY 4.0).
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