Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

In the interest of clearing up what may be common confusion about Chincoteague and Assateauge islands and the wild horses that live there, Kay Frydenborg, author of Wild Horse Scientists, agreed to write a guest post about the topic. Yes, these East Coast islands are most of a continent and a world away from the West’s wild horses, but population management and fertility control are common topics. So here we go. I hope you’ll leave any questions for Kay in the comments!

Sorting Out the Wild Horses of Assateague Island

Since writing Wild Horse Scientists, I’ve run into a lot of folks who are a bit confused about the famous Chincoteague ponies, and that confusion is well-founded. It is confusing. For starters, the animals most people think of when they think of Chincoteague ponies are not ponies, technically, but small horses. And except for a few days each July during Pony Penning (which many people know about from Marguerite Henry’s classic children’s book Misty of Chincoteague and the movie that was adapted from the book), the wild ponies don’t live on the island of Chincoteague, but rather on the larger, uninhabited nearby island of Assateague.

To further complicate things, Assateague Island straddles two states (Maryland and Virginia), and two different federal agencies are in charge of overseeing the wild horses in each state (National Park Service in Maryland, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Virginia). On top of that, the wild “ponies” on the Virginia side of the island are legally the property of the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which has been running the famous round-up, the swim across the channel to Chincoteague, and the foal auction for many years.  The horses are not only rounded up for this annual event (which provides needed funds for the fire company and much tourism for the town), but they are also gathered at other times and given routine immunizations and veterinary and farrier care. Their population is kept at a maximum of about 150 by means of the foal auction alone; no contraceptives are used to limit the herd size in Virginia.

On the Maryland side of Assateague, home of the Assateague Island National Seashore (as well as a Maryland state park within the national park!), the wild horses are managed quite differently. They’re called horses here, not ponies, and managed in a mostly hands-off manner, with no human handling and no roundups. Unless a horse becomes gravely ill or injured and the Park Service determines urgent medical care or euthanasia is required to spare undue suffering, the only human intervention in the lives of these horses is the remote darting (via special rifles) of the contraceptive PZP. Over the 25-plus years that PZP has been used as the sole management tool, the numbers of horses has gradually stabilized to sustainable levels. At the same time, these horses are observed closely from a distance, and careful records are kept for the purposes of effective management of the PZP program and ensuring that a viable gene pool is maintained among the horses.

Though all of the wild horses of Assateague Island descend from the same original herd, after the island was split with the National Seashore designation in 1962, these different management strategies on the two sides of Assateague have resulted in some real differences in the makeup of the herds. You can read much more about these differences, and the 300-plus year history of these unique wild horses, in my book. I hope you’ll check it out!