Cross Breeds

Are there ANY more truly WILD horses in America?

i just wanna know if there are any horses out there anymore that AREN"T awned by humans. that are just on their own running wild and free, like they should be. i have never seen or heard of any wild horses in america, like on the plains where no one lives. are there any more at all?

Public Comments

1. Mustangs are the only wild horses. All animals are owned by humans in some way or another. You have to remember that even the racoons and bears are legally federal property.
2. Mustangs
3. None of the roaming horses in America are truly wild, they are all feral descendents. But yes, there are actually tons of horses in the American wilderness with no owners.
4. mustangs..leave them alone though
5. There are Mustangs and Wild Burros in the West, but they're working on recovering a bunch of them and trying to re home them. My friend has a Mustang that she got 12 years ago when he was 6 months old from the BLM.
6. There are no truly WILD horses in America, or anywhere else. The horse is a domesticated animal. Truly WILD animals have never been domesticated. There ARE horses on their own running free. The mustangs in the west, the Chincoteague ponies on Assateaue Island in Maryland, and various and sundry others. But these so-called "wild" horses are actually feral - they are domesticated animals living on their own, like feral cats.
7. I know a few - mustangs, Chincoteague Ponies, Corolla wild horses and Shackleford Banks wild horses. And if you had ever seen a sick or injured wild horse you wouldn't be so enthralled with how they live.
8. Technically there are no wild horses in America, just feral horses (mustangs). There are only a few mustangs left that truly live like that, most of them live wild on reserves. The only true wild horse left in the world is the Prezwalski wild horse, it has a different chromosome count than the modern breeds.
9. No, they are feral, not wild. Wild implies they have never been domesticated, while feral implies they are descendants of domesticated animals. True wild horses went extinct in the Americas many many many years ago (Well over 300 years, I want to say even before the Finnish got here, which was before the British), now there are just descendants of the horses brought by the British and the Spanish who were either set free or escaped.
10. zephania and a few others are correct....There are NO truly wild horses left in the world. There are horses such as the mustangs that are feral. This means they are domestic animals that have escaped into the wild. They do live free and reproduce free, but they are not truly wild. All modern horses are believed to be descendants of the Przewalski's horse. The last one died if I remember correctly in the 60's. The closest descendant is the Mongolian horse which is a direct descendant and has also been repeatedly recrossed with it. @Tippy...actually wildlife is Public property, not federal. Federal denotes it is owned by the government.....In this country it is owned by the people. Subtle but important difference.
11. There are no truly wild horses. They are all just feral horses or what people like to call "semi-wild"; these are the horses that just walk around, not trapped in a fenced field and they were owned by humans before they either ran off or just got dropped off by owners. The only wild horses would be Chincoteague Ponies and Przewalski Horses. They actually run around loose, not feral being owned a couple years ago past in their life by humans. We caught some "wildies" with my neighbors last spring and I kept the mare and the colt. They were feral horses, they were once owned by somebody in the past. You could tell because she was a pony type (not a true mustang) and she was pretty calm when you were by here, still didn't like people but pretty calm for a "wild horse".
12. There are several bands of feral horses in the US running around wild and free. But they arent totally secluded from humans. The BLM holds yearly roundups to keep the herds at thriving levels. (if too many, most will starve, if too few, natural selection for reproducing would be pathetic, and theyd be extinct in no time.) They arent WILD, all of their ancestors were domesticated horses. And humans control their population. The Chincoteague ponies came from spanish horses whom were shipwrecked and managed to survive on an island off the coast of virginia, the horses have been inbreeding for generations leading to ponies of color. The mustangs of the west are also from spanish horses as well as cowboy horses who were lost and separated from larger herds of domesticated horses forming their own bands of feral horses.
13. Technically, no. All horses in the US are classified as feral, meaning they descended from domesticated horses that escaped or were set free. The only truly wild horses are przewalski's horse in Asia.
14. Owned, dear. And technically no, there are not. All the feral mustangs are technically owned by the US Government. And the mustangs were never truly wild horses to begin with anyway. The mustangs are the result of primarily Spanish horses as well as other breeds being brought over to the Americas and either released or escaping into the wild and breeding. Any of the so-called wild horses in the USA are actually feral horses.
15. Yes, down in like Wyoming there are wild Mustangs, and the government is paying like a $1 a day per horse to feed them twice a week and are shipping them to big ranches in Texas and Oklahoma.
16. Ya, in the west there are quite a few "wild" herds of mustangs. But they aren't techincally wild, because they are owned by the government. But by your definition of wild, they fit the bill.