Full article – with free registration – online here: https://spectator.com/article/how-the-king-can-help-save-dartmoors-ponies/
THE SPECTATOR
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
How the King can help save Dartmoor’s ponies
‘Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills.’ This was how Arthur Conan Doyle described Dartmoor following his visit in June 1901, and that was what I expected to find 125 years after his research for what would become The Hound Of The Baskervilles.
In its place, I found the bright, beautiful light of Devon in summer, revealing a landscape which is almost voluptuously organic, an excess of life, great trees and stones coated in rich mosses, criss-crossed with streams and rivers rushing into rapids. Suitably, I was shown Dartmoor by a pair of hounds I was tasked with caring for, Shelka, a blond German Shepherd who resembles a pretty white wolf, and her wildling daughter, Bolero, whose father was a Carpathian wolf-dog hybrid.
As we walked among the herds of sheep and cattle in that sunlit wilderness there was another, shyer, less civilised animal standing in small groups eyeing me and my lupo-canine companions. They intrigued both the horse-breeder in me and the former biology student. These are the semi-wild Dartmoor Hill Ponies. These creatures have lived here for thousands of years, but they are facing an existential threat thanks to Natural England, a quango that could consign these animals to history.
Full article – with free registration – online here: https://spectator.com/article/how-the-king-can-help-save-dartmoors-ponies/
Concluding paragraphs…
Our present Prince of Wales, like his father, is no stranger to polo or conservation, and is presently embarking on a host of environmental projects on Dartmoor as one of its largest landowners in his role as Duke of Cornwall. In fact, he is visiting one as I write. Perhaps, he would care to bring the Dartmoor Hill Pony under his protection as one of them. By which I do not mean the sensitive selection of Royal patronage between rival charities, or political interventions or even public corrections of bureaucratic crudeness. Instead, the minor addition of the distinguishing words “conservation” and “agricultural” before the phrase “grazing units” to denote horses as a different class to sheep and cattle, suggested to Natural England by Dartmoor’s largest landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall, preventing this unwarranted cull with the stroke of a pen.
For without such a Royal intervention, Britain, in its infinite managerial wisdom, may now be in the process of destroying a most ancient and indigenous upland horse population, and not because anyone hates them, but because the system cannot distinguish between a sheep, a cow and a living fragment of historical ecology.
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