The wild life of the Forest is much the same as that of the remoter
parts of rural England, apart from the ponies and the deer. Of the
latter only a few still roam the glades. An Act was passed in 1851 for
their removal, when the number was reduced from nearly 4,000 to about
250 of two kinds--fallow deer and red deer. Latterly roe deer have
appeared, adventurers from Milton Abbey park. The New Forest pony was
a distinct breed and the writer has been told that it was the
descendant of a small native horse, but its characteristics have been
lost through scientific crossing with alien breeds. A legend used to
be current in the Forest that the ponies were descended from those
landed from the wrecked ships of the Spanish Armada, but there is a
limit to what we may believe of this wonderful fleet. Most villages
along the south coast having rather more than the usual proportion of
dark-haired folk have been claimed as asylums for the castaway sailors
and soldiers of Spain by enthusiastic amateur anthropologists.
Before breaking-in, the Forest pony is a wild and often vicious little
beast--more so, perhaps, than its cousins of Wales and Dartmoor--and a
"drive," when the little horses are corralled, is an exciting and
interesting affair, human wits being pitted against equine, not always
to the advantage of the former.
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