CHAPTER SIX

Cattle and Horses

In early May 2016, on the steppes of the Hustai National Park in Mongolia, I had been reliably told the weather would be sunny, calm and warm. Instead, a blizzard howled, whitening the entire landscape to a state of folded cloth. As John Aitchison, our cameraman, and I arrived at the glacial head of a valley, the snowfall grew so thick that as it blew in waves across us, entire hills vanished entirely, Tipp-Exed from existence for minutes at a time. It was, therefore, quite some time before we realised that a harem of wild horses were feeding just a few metres in front of us.

The horse is one of the world’s most familiar animals. ‘Horsy’ appears to be reliably one of the first animal words learned by many children, and horses have made their way into our lives through more routes than any other animal on Earth. Racing horses. Cart horses. Farm horses. Domestic and pet horses. The horse is an institution, and especially so in Britain. And yet, there is one arena where the horse now appears alien to our native sensibilities – and that is as a truly wild and native animal.

The sight of the wild horses in Mongolia was unearthly and spellbinding. They vanished and appeared, repeatedly, like a flickering set of ghosts. In snowfall almost a metre deep, the lead stallion had punched below the drift and was ripping dense grasses from below. Two bedraggled foals (adorned by a pair of magpies, happily collecting their fur to line nests) hid behind their shaggy fringes, as the snow whipped their faces. Alongside wild asses, musk-oxen and saiga antelopes, wild horses can endure some of the harshest conditions of any herbivore, long after the deer or even boar have moved out.

Horses are masters of endurance. This means that before their widespread extirpation, horses would have been amongst the most adaptable of Europe’s large grazing animals. Pliny the Elder recounts large harems of wild horses living above the snow line in the Alps. We know from the observation of horses in recent European rewilding projects that horses can thrive in high mountains, low wetlands, grasslands, saltmarsh, open wood pastures, larger forest clearings, and diverse shrub-lands. There is, however, one habitat that horses shun – and that is dense woodland. The most obvious explanation for this, although hard to test in the present day, would be to limit the risk of foals being ambushed by wolves.

The fate of this ultra-adaptable animal as a truly wild species is, in one way, straightforward. Over many millennia (humans hunted horses, with specialist spears, as early as 400,000 years ago), we wiped out populations of wild horses across most of the world. And yet, at the same time, the wild horse, in many ways, lived on. Traditionally, the wild horse has been regarded as a single species, divided into just two distinct subspecies. In Britain and much of Europe, the tarpan (Equus ferus ferus), famously depicted in cave paintings in Lascaux, has been historically classified as a single subspecies. In historical times the Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii), known now to the Mongolians as the takhi, or ‘spirit horse’, was believed to roam across the Mongolian and Russian steppes. Debate continues as to whether this more easterly of the two horses is, in fact, a different species from that which occurred in Britain and much of western Europe. Yet the concept of merely two types of wild horse may hide a far more complex truth.

Horses, like zebras, are perhaps more likely to have haunted a large range of habitat types; each varying in their design, or ecotype, based upon factors such as climate, vegetation, altitude and seasonality. Indeed, recent analysis of mitochondrial DNA in established breeds of domesticated horses reveals that across Eurasia, at least 77 different mare bloodlines are responsible for the diversity of horses we see today. As domestic herds spread across Europe, they, in turn, are most likely to have attracted the attention of remaining wild stallions, or mares, and thus the genetic diversity of original wild horse clusters would have been preserved. Therefore, quite how many original species, or subspecies, of wild horse once existed, has not yet been definitively answered – and it may never be.

What has happened, however, is that much of the horse’s ‘wildness’ has been handed down, in parts; each encrypted and spread across the European landscape. From the hardy Yakutian, a native of Siberia that has probably changed little since it shared the steppe with mammoths, to the wetland-savvy Konik, today’s ancient-breed horses and ponies preserve as much wildness as tameness.

Today, the word ‘pony’ conjures images of cuteness, domesticity and being ridden – yet the horses were never consulted on the word’s application. Genealogically, in Britain, the Exmoor pony, whilst far from unchanged through millennia of domestication, is still considered the most similar in structure and ecology when compared to ancestral wild horses. Far hardier than most breeds of cattle, let alone sheep or deer, Exmoors can survive blizzards, repel driving rain with their heavy eyebrows, and eke out a living from the toughest of grasses, thistles, holly and gorse in the very dead of winter. Their lineage remains something of a mystery in terms of their genetic connection to the ancestral tarpan-type species of western Europe, but their morphology – or physical characteristics – are strikingly similar.

The famous cave paintings of Lascaux, in south-west France, etched by our hunting ancestors, depict, with great clarity and attentive observation of detail, the wild animals that lived around at the time. Here, drawings of wild horses, with dense fringes cast over their eyes, stocky, thickset bodies and scruffy black manes, are strikingly similar to animals like the Exmoor that persist until this day. And thus, unlike the now forever-vanished elephants and rhinos of Britain, much of the wild horse survives. It might be fair to say that the wild horses were not rendered entirely extinct, but rather ‘eroded’ over time, wild populations being wiped out as more and more domestic populations came in. Genetically diluted and changed the horse may forever be, but in its shape, character and sociability, the wild horse lives on.

The nativeness of a species to Britain, too, is generally defined around its presence on our island since the last Ice Age – and since we became an island in the first place. Pre-domestication bones of wild horses, however, have been found in Neolithic tombs, dating as recently as 3500 bc. This, at least, renders the horse a lost native – and a native whose many wild skills have, in an age of ponies, racehorses and petting, become largely forgotten.

In their wild capacity, horses were perhaps amongst the most adaptable of all ecosystem engineers – and this would have rendered their effect – in their original numbers, prior to their decimation, or domestication, by ourselves – amongst the greatest and least credited in the animal kingdom. Beavers are tied to water and trees, our ancient aurochs showed a marked attraction to lowlands and floodplains, and even wolves and bears to suitably rocky denning areas – but there are very few landscapes, except dense woodland, which cannot be lived in and shaped by free-roaming horses.

What’s more, horses are hard to predate. Most prey of the grey wolf, Eurasia’s dominant hunter of large animals in recent times, have at least one obvious weakness. Horned animals, such as cattle, are heavy, dangerous at the front, but not enormously agile, or powerful at the rear. Male boar can gore an opponent, but females and young have few defences. Wild horses, however, are extremely well adapted for predator defence. They have speed, muscularity, a devastating kick, a ferocious bite and, above all, a very tight-knit social structure. Generally, their main weakness lies in the fragility of their foals. And this brings us back to the wild horses of Mongolia.

When first reintroduced into the wild after a breeding programme in the 1980s, the Przewalski’s horse proved, at first, extremely vulnerable to predation. Unfamiliar with wolves, many foals and younger animals fell prey to Mongolia’s steppe-hardened packs. But, over time, this began to change. As the cohesion of harems was rebuilt – each dominated by a stallion and breeding female – the behaviour of the horses began to radically alter. Stallions quickly identified wolves as predators, and both stallions and mares have, in Hustai, been observed not only to close ranks around newborn foals, but also to attack, kick and even trample wolves. The sheer power of an adult horse’s hind legs presents a formidable challenge for wolves, which, for all their social guile, are not invulnerable. In their first week of life, wild foals in Mongolia remain vulnerable to wolves, but after this time the risks reduce considerably. At present, in Hustai National Park, it is the large herds of red deer, not horses, that fall prey to wolves instead. The indomitable nature of the horse as an ecosystem engineer, therefore, might be seen as a combination of its adaptability and power – the very two attributes that have earned horses our admiration for millennia.

Wild horses form harems, which are often mutually exclusive of bachelor herds. This means that unlike other social ungulates (wildebeest, for example), prime grazing estate is often dominated by only a limited number of animals, in one place, at one time. Each spring, the harem’s stallion will defend his place in the group against intruding males, seeking the right to mate with not one, but all of the females in the group. These fights can be sudden, chaotic and fierce in the extreme. Males that are well matched will often sidle up to one another, blowing air through their nostrils, heads lowered; their entire heads and manes thrumming with simmering energy as they size each other up. At first, a few swift back-kicks, dealing nothing more than enormous bruises, will generally decide who is in charge. But failing this, conflict between rival stallions can rapidly escalate. Ever fiercer back-kicks give way to full-fronted, two-legged sparring matches, as both rear on their hind legs. Eventually, if still no winner presents, teeth clash and lock, often sinking deep, piercing mane and neck flesh in a sometimes deadly throttle. These fights determine everything in wild horse society; deciding the future of the entire group, and its progeny. Once a stallion is established as the leader of a harem, and has mated, younger males, approaching adolescence, will often be chased from the group. They may then form bachelor groups; relegated to the less nutritious parts of a valley, grassland or wetland. These mechanisms are fascinating in and of themselves, but they also act to spread horses out across a landscape, rather than focus enormous ‘herds’ in one place at one time. So whilst domestic horses in fields can, therefore, ‘ruin’ a habitat, free-roaming wild horses have their own mechanisms for not denuding a landscape beyond ecological repair. Instead, they serve a range of crucial ecosystem functions.

When grazing in grasslands, horses are high-fibre herbivores. They tackle and weed out coarse grasses, thistles, thorn bushes and scrubland, leaving behind, in many cases, finer forage for other herbivores such as deer. Horses take out a lot of the rough grasses in a landscape during the winter months, thus freeing up new plant species to colonise come the spring, and thus, in moving on from a grazing area, diversify the variety of flowering plants. In Hungary’s Aggtelek National Park, where Hucul horses move through the landscape and then on into new valleys and pastures, the lawn left in their wake transforms, weeks later, into a floral mosaic rarely seen in Britain. Indeed, its butterfly meadows far eclipse any of our own; home to numerous species assigned separate habitats here in the UK due, in part, to the rich variety of foodplants and nectar. Here, the habitat of species as varied as large coppers (feeding on water dock and meadow in the wetter parts of the valley) and purple emperors (their caterpillars feasting on sallow, their adults seeking nutrients from horse dung) exist within the same landscape. Over time, enormous dung piles, as they break down and change the nutrient composition of the soil, give way to verdant clumps of nettles; the foodplants, in turn, for yet more caterpillar species.

Of course, with true ‘wildness’ departed, there is always another ecosystem engineer present in the preservation of such meadows: ourselves. But by using 30 horses, grazed across one kilometre at a time, the Aggtelek’s human conservationists have proven how powerful horses would once have been in shaping our grasslands as they moved endlessly throughout the landscape, following the changing seasons and the changing abundance of forage, and avoiding, where possible, the attentions of wolves.

There is even more significance to dead grass removal, however, than merely freeing up a wider range of finer grasses and plants to take root. Dead grasses can, over time, become a significant fire hazard. British conservation, with surprising consistency, advocates burning to remove dead matter. But dead matter only burns if it has attained sufficient density; a density thinned, or removed, by the presence of wild horses.

Where concentrated in preferred feeding areas, wild horses, as we found in Hustai, are able to create a number of microhabitats side by side. One of these is the ‘horse-lawn’. Areas of dung-fertilised prime feeding ground, often beside a river or stream, these tightly cropped feeding areas drew a range of other species, not least dung beetles. Red-billed choughs and wheatears followed the harems, able to find not only an abundance of ground-dwelling beetle fauna, but also the cropped conditions that allowed that fauna to be readily detectable. This ‘lawn’, however, whilst cropped, is not the single-species ‘green’ that we see in so many of our lifeless farmland fields; all nuance, and most grassland flora, removed through penned grazing. It is, indeed, a type of ‘shorn’ meadow, which, on closer inspection, is still very much teeming with small flowers, fine grasses and invertebrates.

In Britain, we can still appreciate the merits of the horse-lawn in that one area where these animals are still left to shape large areas of largely original habitat: the New Forest. Here, around the edges of predominantly deciduous pasture woods, you can often be startled by the incongruous sound of ‘open country’ birds, such as lapwings or curlews, around the very edge of, or within, the forest itself. Yet these species are not using crops, fields or forestry clearings; they are feeding, and nesting, within horse-lawns.

Here, the cropped sward allows woodlarks and lapwings to readily access their prey. Wet streams, flooding areas of the horse-grazed pasture edge, also create the perfect conditions for lapwing chicks to feed. The woodlark, indeed, is perhaps an even more perfect example of an ancestral ‘horse bird’. It sings in scattered, often dead trees close to the woodland edge, feeds in short glades and nests in low, tussocky grasslands. Small nuances such as bracken clumps or even large tufts of heather provide the female with enough cover to hide her nest on the ground. The actions of horses here allow species like the woodlark a hinterland habitat between trees, coarse and open ground.

Across Britain and Europe, you can still get atavistic glimpses of other ‘horse birds’, too. The yellow wagtails nest in dense, tall grassland, feed in cropped, damp grassland and often follow horses to find disturbed insects on the ground. Corvids, such as the jackdaw, magpie, carrion crow and raven, are all intrinsically evolved to seek coarse fur to line their nests come early spring. Having watched Mongolian magpies pluck significant quantities of hair from hapless wild foals, in order to line their nests, it becomes apparent that the ancestral ‘lining’ of British nests would not have been imported sheep, as it is today – but native horse.

There is however one bird, beloved and familiar, whose dependence upon horses, in particular, is even now profound. In early 2021, when appealing across the UK, via social media, for large densities of nesting swallows, it was striking how many of the largest clusters, and most persistent dense populations left in Britain, were strongly associated with horse barns. Today, swallows gravitate to horses in confinement – once, they would have done so in the wild. And just as swallows still follow organic cattle herds in our healthier meadows and grasslands, so, in the future, we might see them once again hawking over horses – a familiar animal whose dung, and the insects it attracts, can dramatically aid the survival of one of our most beloved summer visitors, at the end of its 11,000-kilometre odyssey to our shores.

Scrub-grassland is amongst the richest of all habitats, creating a complex hinterland between patches of dense thorn and an array of grassland types, from meadowlands to pasture, which provide feeding and nesting habitat, both for those bird species that hide in thorn, and for others that spend their entire lives nesting, hiding and feeding in grassland. Horses achieve this by tackling not only the toughest of grass matter at their feet, but also the toughest of bushes and trees. Anyone who has marvelled at a New Forest pony tearing strips off a holly tree in the dead of winter, or gulping down luscious quantities of bramble or gorse, will appreciate the role that horses play in battling back some of the most formidable of our native bushes and trees. In doing so, horses act to create a mosaic habitat; simultaneously freeing up flowers to grow amongst grasses, and protecting grassland glades from complete succession into dense blankets of thorn scrubland or unbroken canopy woodland. The horse is a prime architect of balance in a landscape.

Today, scrub-grassland is amongst the commonest of ‘combination’ habitats maintained by human hands, often at considerable cost, on nature reserves that, being so small, must replicate natural processes in small areas. Humans, however, rarely do such a good job. In many of our small nature reserves, the complex ‘scrub’ elements, ranging from aspiring birch saplings to vital clusters of dense bramble – the home of many nesting passerines and hedgehogs and a vital nectar source for butterflies – are weeded out as undesirable. Pure grassland is often given preference – and this leads, over time, to an ever more specialised, manicured fauna. Over time, the natural jumble of habitats best suited to the broadest spectrum of wild colonists, is lost. Horses, by contrast, do not walk through habitats with fixed management strategies in mind. They tackle vegetation in the half-deliberate, half-random way you might expect from a species with a mobile, harem-led structure where feeding is often interrupted by fighting, mating, playing and drinking. The result is a habitat structure far more ramshackle, diverse and alive than many of the more orderly landscapes we have in Britain today. These ‘soft-edged’ habitats, vanished from many of our lowlands, and even more of our uplands, pack a range of woodland, scrubland and grassland into one place. And as we look to restore our lands in the decades to come, it is to such myriad chaos that we might look for inspiration.

Those planting woodlands from scratch, in Britain, restoring from zero the woodlands we have lost, face something of a quandary with horses. Horses can, and do, eat trees – they can kill saplings, and even, over time, adult trees. In a replete ecosystem, this is an essential role; by leaving standing deadwood within a scrubland ecosystem, horses radically increase the overall biodiversity of a habitat. Yet, if regrowing a habitat from scratch, it may be some time before the beneficial role of horses in an ecosystem can, once again, be realised. In many of the fenced rewilding projects seen in Britain thus far, such as the Carrifran Wildwood (a fenced glen in the Southern Uplands), it has taken 20 years for woodland to grow, like a phoenix, from the barren, overgrazed land. Now a glorious jumble of birch, alder, oak and treeline juniper, the glen is once again alive. In time, however, it will become robust enough for the custodians who once roamed here, and once again the wild horses that once helped shape our hillsides and coasts, our rivers and grasslands may integrate once again into their ancestral home.

If wild horses are the missing, yet essential, component of our grasslands, from our coasts and hills to river valleys and scrub or woodland edges, there was once another animal, even more mighty and powerful, that shaped the majority of the British landscape that was once heavily wooded. It was an animal whose size we can find only in the Indian bison, or gaur, possessed of a muscular majesty, and it is at once utterly alien and familiar to British sensibilities: the aurochs.

Of the cornerstone species long forgotten to our shores, within the Holocene, and since the last glacial period, none was more impressive than the aurochs. The wild ancestor of domestic cattle, this two-metre-tall bundle of muscle would have challenged even a large pack of wolves. Some have even theorised aurochs were so dangerous (like the present-day gaur) that predators such as wolves may simply have avoided them entirely; choosing instead the plenitude of red and roe deer, European elk and other mid-sized prey – species that could be taken with far less threat to life or limb. The fate that befell the aurochs was no different to that of the wild horse. Over time, wild populations were hunted to extinction. As with much of Britain’s fauna, this would happen far earlier on our post-glacial island than in Europe. In Europe, aurochs persisted until 1627, when the last died out in the Jaktorów Forest of Poland. In Britain, it is believed they vanished as long ago as 2,500 years before the present.

The aurochs was a giant animal, with giant ecosystem impact. We can trace that impact in many ways. Indeed, it has left far better traces than many other vanished animals. Its habitat, for example, has been surprisingly well examined. In a comprehensive analysis of fossil records, biologist Stephen J. Hall tested the long-standing hypothesis that aurochs were, predominantly, the governing megafauna of our lowland floodplains and woodlands. He found that the vast majority of fossils of aurochs (in contrast to cave- and crag-favouring species, such as the wolf or brown bear, which often favoured upland areas) came from our lowlands; in many cases, contemporary agricultural areas, long-cleared, where woodlands, or floodplains, or both, would have lain in the past.

Most animals, however, towards the end of their tenure on our planet, are often driven into some form of refugia. Whether the aurochs was always a floodplain species, or whether, over time, it simply became harder to hunt them in floodplain forest, and thus they persisted here for longer, seems difficult to determine. Most of the world’s few remaining wild cattle – such as the Indian gaur – are woodland animals, but can inhabit and thrive in both wetland and drier woodland ecotypes.

Given that 20 per cent of Britain was once wetland, marsh or floodplain, and vast areas, such as the Humber, East Anglian Fens, Cheshire mosslands and Somerset Levels, were shaped entirely by the actions of fresh water over the seasons, the role of aurochs in our wetlands would have been profound.

It has often been observed that floodplains require grazing in order to maintain their maximum biodiversity and the openness beneficial to many of the species that inhabit them. Left alone, bereft of large grazing animals, areas of open wetland, reed-bed, sedge fen and other waterlogged habitats can be quickly colonised by trees such as alder. This process of regeneration is, of course, entirely natural – but it is also entirely natural that such growth should be contested.

Aurochs, armed with curved horns, were grazing animals, and their diet, in spite of their preference for wetland and wooded areas, is believed to have consisted predominantly of grass matter, supplemented by the leaves of woodland trees and scrub. This would have allowed a dual structure to form in our lowlands, with grassland glades kept partially open and free from scrub, whilst trees and shrubs would have been pruned back fiercely but not, necessarily, broken or destroyed. The formidable horns possessed by the aurochs, especially the black males, give us robust hints as to their purpose – indeed, observations of old-breed horned cattle today tell us the same story: the horns were used, when feeding, like a scoop, to pull down branches and rip off twigs and leaves. This would have led to a powerful coppicing effect in our woodlands, long before foresters invented similar, more precise methods millennia later.

In areas such as the original river valleys of the Norfolk Broads, where original floodplain vegetation has been left unchecked by any floodplain ‘gardener’, vast, unbroken alder woodlands have formed. These, in many cases, are surprisingly species-poor, being, in truth, only a part of a wetland ecosystem once gardened by beavers, rotavated by wetland boar, debarked by large herds of red deer – and seriously disrupted by wetland cattle. Sometimes, it is only through the absence of long-lost stewards that you can detect what happens once they’ve gone. In contrast, in Poland’s Biebrza Marshes, where marsh cattle are grazed across the river valley over the course of the year, moving, or being moved, with the seasons, we get a far better glimpse of the diversity of vegetation structure – and biodiversity – once effected by free-roaming cattle in our marshlands.

Given that we cannot travel back in time to study the full range of ecosystem actions carried out by the extinct aurochs, a great deal of reconstruction of how free-roaming cattle, wandering in small family groups, would have impacted and shaped our landscape, has come from far more recent rewilding projects, like those seen on the Knepp Estate, in Sussex, where old-breed horned cattle have been returned to roam the land. At Knepp, Old English longhorns have been the ‘aurochs’ of choice, as documented in Isabella Tree’s international bestseller, Wilding. Given once again the run of the land, and a wide array of habitat choices, and being freed from their farmyard heritage, the longhorns have revealed much about how wild cattle would have, and could again, shape the British landscape.

It is fascinating that simply by moving, eating and defecating, cattle justify their role as cornerstone ecosystem engineers. Compared to roe deer, which can only effectively transport around 28 types of plant seeds around the landscape, cattle can successfully vector more than 230 species of plant, carried and re-seeded from their fur, hooves and gut, often complete with a healthy dose of natural fertiliser. This, in part, reflects the manner in which cattle feed. Lacking an upper set of front teeth, they are relatively coarse feeders, wrapping long tongues around grasses and flowers, unable to be as selective as a smaller, browsing animal possessed of finer dentition. This in turn results in a wide variety of grasses and flowers being ingested – and, days later, distributed as widely across the land as that animal has roamed. This clumsy yet elegant seed dispersal mechanism would once have ensured that plants and flowers were vectored across our wetlands and lowlands, where, no doubt, they would also have taken root in beaver dams and boar wallows, as well as the damp, expectant soil. In addition, even the footprints of cattle can develop into miniature ecosystems in their own right; micro-ponds for newts or, as can be seen in the Outer Hebrides, shallow earthy depressions used by nesting waders such as lapwings.

Like most wild species, it is likely that aurochs had their favourite trees, trees they would have tolerated, and other species they would have avoided entirely – and this in turn would have led to greater variety in the lowland landscape, and the structure of its woodlands. At Knepp, for example, the longhorns’ preference for damp-loving sallows, which would have been common in our floodplains or any lowlands with damp soil, gives clues as to how certain trees were selected. The leaves of sallow contain salicylic acid, a natural anti-inflammatory that is thought to relieve worm burden in cattle – and would have done so long before soil-toxic medications were invented to solve the same problem in our domesticated breeds. Even apparently unfussy eaters are rarely random in their choices. Likewise, it has also been observed that after giving birth, Knepp’s longhorns chew on nettles rich in iron. This reminds us how quickly, and selectively, our onetime wild cattle might have switched diet – and, in doing so, carried out numerous different acts of pruning, gardening and grazing, with a short space of time, and within a small area of the landscape. This is likely, again, to have resulted in the ‘soft-edged’ habitats we find more commonly in eastern Europe, where cattle roam at the ten-kilometre level in some areas, exercising numerous different choices as they go; choices that incrementally shape the landscape and increase its heterogeneity.

How wild cattle and horses once interacted, overlapped and the exact range of habitats they once used, cannot be deduced from the fossil record alone, especially as horses were, it seems, removed earlier from the landscape, in most places, than aurochs were. However, from the available fossil record, and the preferences of our old-breed horned cattle (when given a choice), we know that cattle were woodland animals, whereas horses worldwide are observed to avoid dense woodland, preferring open or semi-open habitats. In some areas, however, it seems very likely cattle and horses would have overlapped: in our rich scrublands, tree-studded grasslands and at the woodland edge, and, perhaps most of all, in our wetlands. Just as the Okavango in Botswana is, to this day, the ultimate nirvana for large herbivores, from zebra to elephant, because it provides the richest feeding environment of all, so Britain’s onetime vast floodplains, from Avalon to the Fens and the Humber, might once have been blackened by aurochs and silvered by horses, all feeding, in complimentary fashion, side by side. And what a sight that would have made.

Today, the rich possibilities of treating cattle and horses as wild animals, of adopting the best of old breeds to create a new future for wild grazers, are just beginning to be realised. Projects like the wildland at Knepp remind us how quickly the competition of small, breeding groups of cattle and horses against vegetation succession can create a rich and varied paradise, now home, in just 20 years, to the greatest density of breeding songbirds in Britain. But all too often, we lack imagination in how we might use these familiar animals to the good of the environment, and the restoration of our lands.

Whereas the grey whale has been lost to all living memory in the UK, cattle and horses are almost too familiar: we forget that they, too, are supposed to be wild, or mistake putting smaller numbers in our fields for effective conservation. If we are to restore the land, cattle and horses must roam free. When they do, these onetime farmyard creatures may reveal, once more, a wildness innate in themselves and in the landscape all around.