“A horse is a thing of such beauty. . .none will tire of looking at him as long as he displays himself in his splendor”
Xenophon
By the early part of the twentieth century, huge numbers of Przewalski’s foals had been captured by exotic animal traders, the most going to a German merchant named Carl Hagenbeck. They were shipped to Asian and European zoos and private collectors. The horse had been described by Colonel Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przewalski, a Russian geographer, only twenty years earlier. Once word was out, they all wanted one.
Carl Hagenbeck, almost single-handedly, managed to decimate most of the herds of the world’s only extant species of truly wild horse. Although Przewalski’s horse had been over-hunted for centuries, the species had never before experienced this sort of devastation. Very few foals survived capture and the arduous journeys they were forced to make. And the methods…
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Curzon 