What Was Always Theirs

Wild Horses Healing the Earth — Hungary

How much of it does the horse actually need from us? When we set out to bring wild horses back to a landscape, we breed them and feed them, we haul their water through the dry, we count them and treat them and carry them from place to place. The work is real — in some places it is the only reason the species is still alive at all. But it is worth asking who the work is really for. Is it the horse that needs all of it? Or is it us, unable to picture simply standing back and letting the animal be an animal on the land? In 1997, in eastern Hungary, someone set out to answer that on purpose.

The place is the Hortobágy — the puszta, the great alkaline grassland of the Hungarian plain. It is the western reach of the same enormous steppe that runs east through the Ukrainian flatlands and the Mongolian heartland all the way to the Chinese basin: one long ribbon of grass across a continent, and this is its far European end. The soil here is too salty to plough and always has been, so no one ever broke it; for centuries it was simply pasture, grazed and left, grazed and left. And the ground remembers older grazers than sheep. Bone findings from the region show that aurochs — the wild ox — and wild horses belonged here once, part of the living machinery of this grass long before any of it was named. This is not foreign country for a wild horse. It is ancestral ground at the opposite corner of the range.

What was built on it was not a breeding farm. It was a question made into a place. Pentezug Reserve — about three thousand hectares, fenced, set in the heart of the national park, established by the Hortobágy directorate together with the Cologne Zoo — was made to find out one thing: how a grassland works when the human role is minimized and the grazers are allowed to lead. Minimal human interference was not an accident of underfunding. It was the entire design.

And it was not the horse alone. The old grazing community was rebuilt as a community: around twenty-one Przewalski's horses and around forty reconstructed aurochs — cattle bred back, over generations, to stand in for the wild ox we drove off the earth entirely. Two kinds of grazer, set down side by side, the way they would have stood together on this grass thousands of years ago. That matters for honesty's sake, and we will hold to it: this series follows the horse, but at Pentezug the horse is not a soloist. It is one piece of a guild — the way an organ is one piece of a body.

Then they were left. Not fed, not watered — the reserve's brackish marshes give water and minerals the year round, so the land itself provides and no one has to. Beyond fencing the ground and carrying the animals in, that was the whole of the plan: turn the grazers loose and step back.

They did it as though they had never stopped. From around twenty-one horses, the herd climbed past two hundred within fifteen years, and on past three hundred — one of the largest gatherings of the last wild horse anywhere on Earth, roughly a third of the entire European population, born on the ground with no help from us. Fifty foals a year, made by the horses, for the horses, out of nothing we provided. The dry recovery of China and the rescued homecoming of Mongolia were hard-won with breeding centers and transports and decades of human labour. Here the labour was to fence the ground and let go.

And the land answered, the way it always does when the grazer comes back. Before the horses and aurochs, the meadows had been thickening and closing — ungrazed grass running to a uniform tall sward, reeds creeping over the wet ground and shutting it down. Once the grazers were turned loose into it, the place broke open into a mosaic again: short turf and tall stand and bare scrape all braided together, the orchids returning to the cleared light, the reedbeds opened back up into shelter for protected birds, the stone curlew finding its ground once more. No one engineered that recovery. No one planted the orchids or invited the birds. The grazers were restored, and the living world reassembled itself behind them — because reassembling it was never our work to do. It was theirs.

This is the thing the whole series has been circling, and Hungary is where it stands clear of everything else. The horse is not a tool we use to improve a grassland. The horse is a piece of the grassland — an organ the body was missing. You do not teach a returned organ how to work. You do not manage it back into function. You put it back, and the body runs the pattern, because the pattern was written into the organ the whole time. China named it: the animal the grassland designed. Hungary is where that design proves it can run itself. Set the piece down on the ground that shaped it, draw a line around enough room, and step back — and a whole living world assembles out of almost nothing that we did.

It would be false to call it untouched, and the falseness would be exactly the kind a careful reader could pull a thread from, so we say it plainly. People made this. People fenced the three thousand hectares, chose the grazers, carried them in, set them down. That was a real act — and it was very nearly the only one. But there is one more, and it is worth seeing precisely what it is and what it is not.

The horses bred so well that they began to outgrow the reserve. So the keepers stepped back in — not to feed them or haul them water, but to slow them down: a contraceptive given to some of the mares, surplus animals lifted out and carried elsewhere. Human intervention, plainly. But look where the need comes from. A wild horse population on open range regulates itself; it spreads, it disperses, it finds the edge of what the land will carry and settles there. These horses cannot, because we drew a line around them. The only ongoing help the horse needs at Pentezug is to be kept from overflowing a box we built. That is not the animal failing to manage on its own. It is the animal succeeding so completely that it presses against the single limit we left it — the fence. The surplus is not a problem of the horse. It is the measure of how little the horse needed us in the first place.

And that surplus goes somewhere. The horses lifted out of Pentezug are sent back into the world — some of them home to Mongolia, to the very steppe the species was carried away from a century ago. The most hands-off place we have made becomes a wellspring: the reserve where we did the least sends its overflow back to the places still learning how, and is watched and measured year after year so that what the grass teaches here can be carried out there. The far rung helps hold up the near ones.

So here is the top of the climb. China, propped up heavily and brought home in crates. Mongolia, steadied still, a hand kept on the thread through the killing winters. And Hungary — fenced, set down, and left — out of which came a self-sustaining herd of the last wild horse on Earth and a grassland that remembered how to be a mosaic. Put in almost nothing. Get back a living world.

You do not run that the way you would run a ledger. You do not ask whether an organ earns its keep; an organ is not efficient, it is necessary. So we will leave the arithmetic where it lies, for now. The thing to carry out of Hungary is the ratio itself — how astonishingly little the horse asks of us, and how much of the living world comes back when it is simply allowed to be what it is.

Which leaves the question that the smallness begs. If the work is in them — if you can set the piece down and walk away and the world reweaves itself behind it — then what, exactly, is in them? What does the body of a horse actually do to the ground beneath it, that water and grass and flowers and birds should follow it back? That is the next thing to understand. It is where we go next.

References

• Kerekes, V. et al., Trends in demography, genetics, and social structure of Przewalski's horses in the Hortobágy National Park, Hungary over the last 22 years, Global Ecology and Conservation 25 (2021): e01407. (Reserve established 1997 by Hortobágy NP Directorate and Cologne Zoo; aim of minimal human interference; population grew from ~22 founders to 329 in 2017; ~270 at the end of 2018, roughly 30% of the European population; population control by birth control and transport necessary.)
• Kerekes, V. et al., Analysis of habitat use, activity, and body condition scores of Przewalski's horses in Hortobágy National Park, Hungary, Nature Conservation Research 4 (Suppl. 2) (2019): 31–40. (24.5 km² semi-reserve; reconstructed aurochs, Bos taurus taurus, bred alongside the horses; "once the homeland of their distant ancestors"; population-control strategies from 2007 and 2013.)
• Rewilding Europe, Pentezug Project and First Hungarian initiative joins the European Rewilding Network, 2023. (Aim to minimize the human role; surplus food or water usually not offered; once-ungrazed meadows transformed into a mosaic habitat; green-winged orchid, opened reedbeds, and Eurasian stone curlew benefiting; ~300 of a ~1,900 global population.)
• Hortobágy National Park Directorate, Breeding of the Przewalski's Horse (hnp.hu). (Founders chosen by Dr. Waltraut Zimmermann of the Cologne Zoo to minimize inbreeding; arrived in small harem groups of one stallion and three mares; PZP contraception used to slow population growth; surplus horses transferred elsewhere, some mares reintroduced to the wild in Mongolia.)
• Earth Island Journal, The Endangered Przewalski's Horse Needs More Room to Roam. (21 Przewalski's horses and 40 reconstructed aurochs introduced 1997–2001; population grew from 21 to 200 in 15 years; 3,000-hectare fenced preserve with open grassland and brackish wetlands providing water and minerals year-round; Pentezug sustains reintroduction projects as a backup gene pool.)
• Horsetalk.co.nz, Back from the brink: A Przewalski's horse success story, 2020. (Founder count and growth to 329 in 2017; harem numbers peaking at 30; decline to 267 by the end of 2018.)