It is already pitch dark when I arrive in the small town of Midwolda, in the far North of the Netherlands. I call Dirk Brul, the manager of Ennemaborgh and ask him for the key to the barn, my hotel for the night. I will not sleep alone.

“Insights from the pedigree on the social structure of free-roaming Konik horses (Equus caballus) in a Dutch reserve” by prof. Amos Bouskila, dept. of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Wild horses have been an intricate part of the wildlife of Europe since hundreds of thousands of years. During historical times, wild horses have been described by contemporaries from the ancient period, untill the 19th century AD. Herodotos, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC talks about wild living horses somewhere in present day Belorussia. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist living in the first century AD, describes that vast herds of wild horses were living north of the Alps.