The UK government has issued a denial after mounting speculation that 90% of Dartmoor hill ponies were to be culled.
Speculation started over confusion around current grazing policy. So why have these animals been dragged into a political storm?
Britain’s semi-wild pony herds should otherwise be a conservation success story. As concern grows over biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, these animals are increasingly recognised for the role they can play in restoring damaged landscapes.
But on Dartmoor, policy decisions intended to improve the condition of protected habitats appear to threaten the long-term future of the very ponies helping to maintain them. UK government agencies are again pushing for reductions in grazing animals on Dartmoor’s commons. If those changes go ahead, one of Britain’s most distinctive semi-wild pony populations could face an uncertain future.
That comes despite the findings of a recent independent review commissioned by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The Fursdon review was launched in 2023 after a bitter dispute over how Dartmoor’s protected moorland should be managed. Its aim was to find ways to improve the condition of the moor while supporting the people and traditional practices that help shape it.
The review concluded that ponies are an important part of the solution.
Unlike sheep and cattle, ponies occupy a distinct ecological niche, as my research has shown. They eat more vegetation relative to their body weight than ruminants (such as cattle, goats and sheep). They also graze differently.
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Like cattle, ponies are generalists, willing to eat rougher and less nutritious plants that sheep tend to avoid. Ponies are more likely than cattle to graze purple moorgrass (Molinia caerulea), a species that has spread widely across parts of Dartmoor and many other upland areas. Managing molinia was identified by the review as an important conservation priority.
These characteristics help explain why ponies are increasingly being used by organisations such as the National Trust, RSPB and local Wildlife Trusts in habitat restoration projects across the UK. In many places, they are now recognised as valuable conservation grazers.
So why are semi-wild ponies such as the Dartmoor hill pony, the Carneddau pony (of parts of Eryri, also known as Snowdonia) and the Welsh hill pony under threat? At a time when nature recovery, biodiversity and rewilding dominate environmental debates, why are we in danger of losing animals that have lived on Britain’s hills for thousands of years?
Part of the answer lies in what these ponies are not.
They are not “proper” breeds. They have no breed standard, no stud book and no pedigree registration. They will never appear in the ring at the Horse of the Year Show. They are classified as semi-wild or feral because the takhi or Przewalski’s horse (a rare and endangered wild horse originally native to the steppes of central Asia) is considered to be the only remaining wild horse.
But that can obscure something important. For thousands of years, the physical and behavioural characteristics of these local pony populations have been shaped largely by natural selection rather than human breeding. These animals are fundamentally different from modern native breeds that have been selectively bred by people.
The Dartmoor pony and the Welsh mountain pony, for example, were both formalised in the early 20th century and include Arabian bloodlines. Despite their similar names, they should not be confused with the semi-wild hill ponies that continue to roam the uplands.
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Not livestock nor wildlife
Nor are these animals really livestock. Although they are technically owned by the commoners and pony keepers on whose land they graze, they are not kept for agricultural production. Their numbers are managed through periodic round-ups, but the animals have little commercial value.
The Fursdon review recognised this distinction. It recommended that “ponies and cattle should not be linked for the calculation of stocking rates” and that any actions likely to reduce pony numbers should be avoided.
Yet new countryside stewardship agreements are setting grazing limits for “cattle and/or ponies” as though the two are interchangeable. Meanwhile, wild deer, which are also large grazing herbivores, are excluded from those calculations.
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Semi-wild ponies do not fit neatly into the category of wildlife either. They receive none of the legal protections available to wild species and their habitats. Despite their semi-wild status, they are often overlooked in rewilding projects that seek to restore natural grazing processes. Instead, some projects have favoured imported Konik ponies (a Polish pony breed), often based on questionable assumptions about their origins and suitability.
As a result, semi-wild pony populations have spent years falling between the cracks of conservation and agricultural policy. That would be a remarkable fate for animals that have been part of Britain’s uplands since the Bronze age.
Dartmoor hill ponies were already grazing the moor as the peatlands that dominate today’s conservation debates were expanding across the landscape. They have lived through Saxon settlement, the rise and decline of tin mining and successive waves of agricultural policy that encouraged both overgrazing and undergrazing.
Today, these ponies are more than a cultural symbol. They are living components of upland ecosystems and are increasingly recognised as valuable partners in habitat restoration. If society is serious about nature recovery, it should attempt to find ways to protect and support these unique herds.
It would be a bitter irony if animals that can help restore damaged landscapes were lost because environmental policymakers failed to recognise their value.
