Book Review: The Last Wild Horses

"When is a species extinct?  When not a single live specimen is to be found?  For when the last free specimen has disappeared?"

Dogs came to us through the domestication of the wolf.  Pigs came to us through the domestication of the wild boar.  The chicken is descended from the red jungle fowl, the sheep from the mouflon.  But what of the horse?  The domestic horse is the domesticated descendent of the tarpan, the wild horse of the European steppes and forests.  If you haven't heard of it, it's probably for the simple reason that it is extinct, and has been for over a century (despite some efforts of questionable biological principles to bring the species back to life).

The tarpan wasn't the very last of the true wild horses on the face of the earth.  In the 1880's, a Russian cavalry officer and geographer named Nikolai Przewalski discovered a population of true wild horses roaming the steppes of Mongolia.  The species (or subspecies, depending on one's taxonomic preference) is sometimes known by its native Mongolian name, takhi.  Most often, it is known as Przewalski's wild horse (because that name is a challenge for many English speakers, I usually hear it referred to as Asian wild horse, or simply "P. horse)."

In The Last Wild Horses, Norwegian author Maja Lunde tells the story of the horse through the eyes of three generations throughout history, moving back and forth between them.  First, we experience the horses through the eyes of a Russian zoo official.  Almost as soon as he is made aware of the animal's existence, a quiet bureaucrat is pushed wildly out of his comfort zone when he finds himself on an expedition to Mongolia to bring back the first wild horses for his zoo.  He is accompanied by a character who is so obviously a stand-in for the famous German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck that for a while, I was really confused as to why they didn't just use Hagenbeck himself (not giving anything away, but about halfway through the narrative, I was like... Oh.  That's why).    Lunde does not gloss over the hardships that animals experienced during these expeditions - so fair warning, some parts of these sections will be sad.

Then, we move to almost-present, when a German veterinarian is trying to escape the demons of her past (and manage her relationship with her drug-addicted son) by returning the wild horse to the plains of Mongolia.  When I was a child, the species had been driven completely to extinction in the wild, with the only specimens remaining in zoos.  Lunde offers a fictionalized version of the reintroduction of the takhi to Mongolia.  (I especially appreciated the reminiscences of wild horses on the estate of Nazi leader Herman Goring during World War II, acknowledging the role that these horses played in the Nazi's obsession with breeding back "Germanic" animals).  Her account begins, rather than ends, with the moment that the crates are opened and the horses thunder out.  Instead, she does a remarkable job of telling of the interplay of heartache, triumph, despair, and hope that characterize any conservation project, especially one that seeks to restore a species to a habitat from which it has been absent for a century.

Lastly, we skip ahead to the dystopian near future (this book is a part of a series written by Lunde called "The Climate Quartet," though it reads fine on its own - I hadn't read any of the others yet).  Climate change, extinctions, and political instability have caused the gradual collapse of our civilization, with much of Europe being essentially a continent or vagabonds and refugees.  Amidst the bleakness, a mother-and-daughter, last remnants of a family of Norwegian zookeepers, try to tend to the tiny remnant of animals on their farm - including Przewalski's horses to secure their future, even as they themselves look starvation in the eye.  

Lunde's writing (or the English translation of it, at any rate) is compelling and engaging, and I'll give her the benefit of the doubt that the few scientific errors (such as referring to horses as ruminants) are not of her doing.  I feel like there is a perspective that we are missing which would have made the story a better, more complete one, though - a Mongolian perspective.  Although we meet Mongolian herdsmen who assist our pseudo-Hagenbeck and his bumbling sidekick in their attempts to capture wild horses, as well as a later generation of Mongolian biologists who help guide the reintroduction program - we never are given their stories.  I would have enjoyed a set of chapters told by a character of their culture. especially to see what the horses meant to these equestrian nomads in the years before Przewalski made the scene. 

The Last Wild Horses at Amazon.com