428 THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE [CH. 



in Barbary in the sixteenth century. That some parts of 

 the region lying between Egypt and the Atlantic were 

 admirably adapted for horses is proved by the accounts of 

 Numidian and Cyrenean horse-breeding and by the fact that 

 the kumrahs, the descendants of horses that have run wild, 

 flourish in Northern Nigeria, where they are occasionally 

 captured and broken in. How easy it is to exterminate 

 the Equidae and other larger mammals has unhappily been 

 too well demonstrated in our own time by the extinction 

 of the quagga and all but complete destruction of the 

 mountain zebra in South Africa, and the reduction of the 

 vast herds of the North American bison to a few hundreds, 

 which can only maintain a precarious existence under artificial 

 protection. There are various reasons which lead especially to 

 the destruction of the wild horse. In the first place it has 

 been valued as food by many tribes, who have not domesticated 

 it ; secondly, when once a community has learned to tame and 

 utilise the horse, the wild horse becomes a valuable prize when 

 taken alive; thirdly, when the chief wealth of a community, such 

 as those of the Tartars, the Gauchos, and the Pampas Indians, 

 consists of horses, herds of wild horses are a constant nuisance 

 and danger, as the domestic animals are often enticed away by 

 their wild relations ; fourthly, where pasture is often scarce, as 

 in various parts of Africa, pastoral peoples, such as the Boers 

 and Australian stock keepers, are always anxious to exter- 

 minate, or at least to lessen, the numbers of the large her- 

 bivores. If it be said that it is only by the use of fire-arms 

 that such extermination takes place and that it could not be 

 effected by men armed merely with spears, javelins, and lassoes, 

 and that it is not at all likely that domestic horses handicapped 

 by a rider's weight could overtake their unweighted wild 

 brethren, these assertions can be at once disproved by modern 

 instances. 



How men on horses and without fire-arms are able to ride 

 down wild horses and to kill or capture them is made clear by 

 Azara 1 , who relates that the Gauchos of the Pampas constantly 



1 Quadrupeds of Paraguay, p. 14 (Eng. trans.). 



