Small, isolated herd not related to horses brought to Americas by Spanish.
A genetic study of the wild horses of B.C.’s Chilcotin region is offering a new and surprising explanation of their origins.
The study found that while it is possible other wild horses encountered in B.C. by early Europeans were descendants of those introduced by the Spanish to the Americas in the early 1500s, new DNA tests on wild horses of the Chilcotin’s Brittany Triangle show no link to those ancient herds.
Rather than being related to the Spanish breeds, which were assumed to have worked their way northward up the continent through trading, the small B.C. herd showed strong ties to the Canadian horse — a unique breed to Canada that had its origins in France — and, to a lesser extent, the Yakut horse from Russia’s eastern Siberia.
Photo: Wild Horses by Jeremy Hiebert under the license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0