This is a non-commercial, independent website, owned and written by Nancy Kerson, for the benefit of actual and potential adopters of BLM Mustangs and Burros and similar animals.
DVD or VHS (2-DVD or 2-VHS set) almost 3 hours of instruction!
$39.95 plus $5 shipping/handling = $44.95 total
Lesley Neuman: The First Touch Gentling Your Mustang $45.00
Lesley works with 3 wild horses at a BLM adoption, and very clearly explains what is happening, what she is doing, & what she sees in each horse as it progresses. Study this video and you can learn "pressure and release" gentling techniques to gentle your own new mustang!
Help for Burro adopters! Crystal Ward Donkey Training
All the basics of gentling, handling, and training. A MUST for new burro adopters! Good for domestic donkeys, too!
PRE-HISTORY OF THE HORSE: North America was the original home of the horse species. They evolved here, and thrived here for over 57 million years. The plant and animal communities of North American ecology evolved with horses playing an integral role. About 8,000 - 10,000 years ago, for reasons not yet fully understood (meteors, climate change, pandemic, and human hunting pressures are among the possibilities), horses are believed to have become extinct in the land of their origin. Luckily by that time they had migrated to Asia, where they spread into Europe and North Africa.
THE SEVEN LIVING SPECIES OF THE EQUUS FAMILY During the Pleistocene Era, there were more than 50 species of equids in the Americas. Now there are, worldwide, only 7 (or 8, depending on how you classify Przewalski's. Some consider it a separate species, others say it is a subspecies of equus caballus)
Przewalski's Horse or Takhi www.takhi.org/cms/index.php Some hold Przewalski's to be a separate species from the domestic horse (Equus Caballus), the last remnant of the wild horseEquus ferus, others hold it is a subspecies of Equus caballus.
Although the Przewalski's horse has 66 chromosomes, compared to 64 in a domestic horse, the Przewalski's horse and the domestic horse are the only equids that cross-breed and produce fertile offspring, possessing 65 chromosomes.[3]
"The Przewalski horse can be crossed successfully with the domestic horse, producing offspring with 65 chromosomes. Unlike the offspring of a domestic horse and an animal such as a donkey or zebra, the offspring of a Przewalski/domestic horse is not sterile and can be crossed back to either species. If the offspring is crossed back to a domestic horse, the resulting animal will have 64 chromosomes and very few Przewalski characteristics." - WIKIPEDIA
Nubian Wild Ass - as a Wild animal The progenitor of all modern donkeys, including the Burro of the western states and Mexico. It was first domesticated about 6000 years ago. The Nubian Wild Ass is most likely extinct in the wild since the 1950's. However, the IUCN Red List[1] still mentions it as critically endangered. - Wikipedia
Grevy's zebraMountain zebraPlains Zebra Zebras are horse or donkey-like animals with stripes. They are social animals who live in small harems or large herds. Zebras were the second modern equid to diverge from the earliest proto-horses, after the asses, around 4 million years ago. They are close enough genetically to horses to interbreed, although the offspring, like horse-donkey offspring, are sterile. (Horse-Zebra crosses are called Zorses)
The three existing zebra species differ in appearance primarily in ear shape and striping patterns. To each other, they differ in more fundamental ways: Although their territories overlap, they do not interbreed in the wild. In captivity, Plains Zebras have been successfully crossed with Mountain zebras. Attempts to breed Grevy's zebras to Mountain Zebras results in a high rate of miscarriage. In captivity, crosses between zebras and other (non-zebra) equines have produced several distinct hybrids, including the zebroid, zeedonk, zony, and zorse. (much of this is drawn from Wikipedia)
Although it is currently popular to own a zebra, zebras resist domestication, are extremely strong, have a far more powerful sense of self-preservation than other equines, require very expensive fencing and handling equipment, and generally make unreliable exotic pets. Although a few trainers occasionally manage to train an individual zebra to a basic level of performance (catching, haltering, leading, perhaps doing a few tricks or allowing a person to sit on its back briefly) , zebras have so far never been succesfully domesticated. There is an old African saying, "If Zebras could be trained, no one (in Africa) would be walking..."
EQUUS SPECIES THAT HAVE BECOME EXTINCT WITHIN THE PAST 150 YEARS
Tarpan This is the only known photo of a live Tarpan, ''Equus ferus ferus''. This Tarpan stallion was caught in 1866 and purchased by the zoo of Moscow. Some dispute if it was a true Tarpan, due to the length of the mane.
It is now thought that the domesticated horse, named Equus caballus by Linnaeus in 1758, is descended from the Tarpan; Many taxonomists consider them to belong to the same species. - Wikipedia
Quagga mare in London Zoo in 1870 Quagga The Quagga was native to desert areas of the African continent until it was exterminated in the wild in the 1870s. The last captive Quaggas died in Europe in the 1880s.
The quagga was the first extinct creature to have its DNA studied. Recent genetic research at the Smithsonian Institution has demonstrated that the Quagga was in fact not a separate species at all, but diverged from the extremely variable Plains Zebra, Equus burchelli, between 120,000 and 290,000 years ago, and suggests that it should be named Equus burchelli quagga. - Wikipedia
During most of the Twentieth century, it was believed that the pre-extinction American horse was a more primitive form of equid, and not the true horse of today - perhaps closer to Eohippus (a 5-toed progenitor of the horse) than Equus Caballus. But in September of 1993, some placer miners in the Yukon uncovered a frozen horse carcass in the permafrost. Well preserved, the brownish red horse looked like any other horse that might have recently died and been buried in the mud. When archeologist Ruth Gotthardt went to investigate, she first thought the carcass might be the remains of a horse that had died during the Yukon Gold Rush about 100 years before. The stomach contents were still intact, and the body still had red coat and flaxen mane.
Nevertheless, she sent the carcass to Dr. Richard Harington, a paleontologist and Curator of Quaternary Zoology at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and a bone sample to Miami for radiocarbon dating. Analysis revealed it was about 25,000 years old! Since equus caballus was believed to have appeared only after its progenitors had exited North America, this carcass was originally classified as an extinct species, Equus lambeii. But DNA analysis (not to mention the obvious physical resemblance) proved it to be in all respects the same as the modern horse, equus caballus. This proved that the modern horse is a true native species.
Other prehisotric horse discoveries include one is Nevada and another in California:
PYRAMID LAKE HORSE: In 1985, an Ice Age Horse, a true horse (Equus pacificus), was discovered in the mud flats near Pyramid Lake, Nevada. He was found lying on its left side. Nevada State Museum & the Pyramid Lake Tribe worked together. The horse was restored into a complete skeleton of an Ice Age horse. The exhibit shows what the Black Rock Desert may have looked when the lakes evaporated, when mammoths & native horses still lived.
This article describes an archaeological find in Carlsbad, California, of the skeletons of a horse and burro that pre-date Spanish entry into modern-day California (but not Spanish presence on the North American continent).
Artists' conceptions of prehistoric, indigenous, North American Wild Horses
"North America is the cradle of evolution for all three branches of the horse family: zebra, asses, and caballine horses.
During all this vast period of time, co-evolution has occurred between members of the horse family and the many symbiotic plants and animals with which horses and their kin have made the great journey of life.
It has become abundantly clear to me that today’s wild horses and burros are major missing pieces in the ecological jigsaw puzzle."
The Utah Geological Survey mentions the horse, althouhh the focus of the article is on the more spectacular speies, such as Mammoths and Giant Sloths. http://geology.utah.gov/utahgeo/dinofossil/iceage/iceage.htm "Gravel quarries along the Wasatch Front contain the bones of many Ice Age animals. These gravels were deltaic deposits formed in Lake Bonneville. The animals that roamed the shores of Lake Bonneville included big-horn sheep (Ovis), horses (Equus), and bison (Bison), whose living relatives are found in Utah today, as well as animals such as musk oxen (Bootherium bombifrons), camels (Camelops hesternus), and giant ground sloths (Megalonyx jeffersoni), who have living relatives in other parts of the world."
copyright 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Nancy Kerson, all rights reserved - I'm happy to share, just need to be asked and have credit given where due.
Disclaimer: Horses are inherently dangerous. Use the information contained within this website at your own risk.
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For photos and more information about the Yukon Horse & horse palentology, go to the website of the Yukon Beringea Interpretive Center in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada. 
News Flash, December 15, 2009:
