Americas The best-known examples of modern-day feral horses are those of the American West. When
Europeans reintroduced the horse to the Americas, beginning with the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadors in the 15th century, some horses escaped and formed
feral herds known today as
mustangs. In the Western United States, certain bands of horses and
burros are protected under the
Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. There are about 300,000 horses today in multiple land jurisdictions across the country, including tribal lands. Isolated populations of wild horses occur in a number of places in North America, including
Assateague Island off the coast of
Virginia and
Maryland,
Elko, Nevada, the
Salt River in
Arizona, and
Cumberland Island, Georgia,
Vieques Island off the coast of
Puerto Rico, and
Sable Island off the coast of
Nova Scotia, Canada. Some of these horses are said to be the descendants of horses that managed to swim to land when they were
shipwrecked. Others may have been deliberately brought to various islands by settlers and either left to reproduce freely or abandoned when assorted human settlements failed. Many prehistoric horse species, now
extinct, evolved in North America, but the wild horses of today are the offspring of horses that were domesticated elsewhere.
Asia The only truly wild horses in existence today are
Przewalski's horse native to the steppes of central Asia. A modern wild horse population (
janghali ghura) is found in the Dibru-Saikhowa National Park and Biosphere reserve of
Assam, in north-east
India, and is a herd of about 79 horses descended from animals that escaped army camps during
World War II. In Ashuradeh Island in Iran, feral horses can also be found. It is said that the wild horses of the Miankaleh Wildlife Refuge are the descendants of Russian domestic horses that remained on the island after its occupation by Russia in 1837.
Europe In
Portugal, a population of free-ranging horses, known as
garrano, lives in the northern mountain chains. These horses are also present in
Galicia, where they have a long history with the local populations embodied in the
Rapa das Bestas rituals. In County Kerry, Ireland, wild bog ponies have been known since at least the 1300s. More than 700 feral wild horses live in the
foothills of
Cincar Mountain, between
Livno and
Kupres,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, in an area of roughly . These animals, which descend from horses set free by their owners in the 1950s, enjoy a protected status since 2010. In Sardinia lives the
Giara Horse, a wild variety that inhabits the
Giara di Gesturi, a basaltic plateau in the southern central part of the island. The population is composed by about 700 horses.
Oceania Australia has the largest population in the world, with about 400,000 horses. The Australian name equivalent to the mustang is the
brumby, descendants of horses brought to Australia by
British settlers. ==Modern feral horses==