Born To Be Wild

On the Garub plains in south-western Namibia, the future of a population of wild horses hangs in the balance

- Ron Swilling

There’s little that compares to the sight of a wild horse thundering to the waterhole on the Garub plains of Namibia, mane flying, dust exploding around its hooves. For more than a century, these horses known as the Namibs have lived in the Namib-Naukluft Park between Aus and Lüderitz, but survival in the Namib Desert is no easy feat.

They have adapted their behaviour and endured (with a little help from their friends) the continual cycle of droughts that keeps their numbers down and tempers their gene pool – the cycle of abundance and drought is a natural part of life in the desert.

But the last few years have brought another challenge that has left them hovering on the brink of extinction. At Garub, I meet up with wild-horse expert Telané Greyling, doctor of zoology, to hear how they are faring.

I arrive mid-year, when the five-year drought has finally broken and 40 millimetres of rain has collected in rock pools and sunk into the bleached sand. I cannot wish for a more auspicious time for my visit. As we drive along the back roads, Telané stops whenever she sees horses, identifying them through binocs. We climb out of the vehicle, surveying the surroundings from a clump of granite.

“That’s Richard,” she says when she spots the stallion grazing in the distance. I realise that, after almost three decades of studying the horses, Telané can identify every horse, and has named all of them. “The Namibs comprise family groups that range from around two to ten individuals, and bachelor stallions.”

For her master’s degree in 1994, she studied the behavioural ecology of these wild horses, researching the size of the family groups, group dynamics, what the horses eat and how often they drink, which yields fascinating information as to how a population of horses lives when not in a domestic setting.