Oregon couple revives prehistoric Tarpans

PRINEVILLE, Ore. -- Lenette Stroebel used to drive by horses on a nearby ranch and wonder at the funny-looking animals with stand-up manes, faint zebra markings and stout, rounded bellies.

A horse lover for decades, she had never seen anything like them.

"Just being a horse person, I'd say, 'What are those?' I tried to put two and two together," said Stroebel, who first spotted the horses in the mid-1980s. "I knew this was something very different."

It turned out Stroebel had stumbled onto a unique breeding project conceived in the mid-1960s by Harry Hegardt, another horse lover. Hegardt had dedicated years to recreating an extinct, prehistoric horse from diluted genes still found in American wild mustangs.

By the time Stroebel noticed Hegardt's unusual herd, he had succeeded in breeding rare horses -- called Tarpans -- that looked astonishingly like their ancient ancestors painted on cave walls by early humans.

"He finally hit on the right horses and started getting the right color and the right size and then he even started getting the stand-up mane. He knew he had really hit on something," said Stroebel.

She and her husband, Gordon, bought Hegardt's herd of 20 horses when he died in 1990, and has continued his project on their property, nestled in Central Oregon scrubland. They eventually named their ranch Genesis Equines.

Like its wild ancestor, which died out in the late 1800s, the modern Tarpan has a thick mousy-gray coat -- called "grulla" -- marked by a black stripe that runs from its head to the tip of its tail. Today's Tarpan is slightly bigger than its ancestors -- about 52 inches tall -- and well-proportioned, despite a rotund stomach and thick head.

Tarpan hooves are so hard the horses don't need shoes -- a holdover from the days when the little horses roamed Europe and the Middle East in wild herds after the last Ice Age. Early humans noticed the original Tarpans and may have even hunted them. Rock paintings of the Tarpans' distant ancestors, with rounded bellies and spiky manes, decorate the walls of caves occupied by humans 15,000 years ago.

As centuries passed, however, human expansion narrowed the horses' wild range. Farmers viewed them as pests. The last wild Tarpan, a mare, was killed when she was chased off a cliff around 1890, according to the American Tarpan Studbook Association in Medford, Wis.

Fascination with the breed, however, did not die out.

German brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck began in the 1920s and '30s to try to "recreate" the lost Tarpan. They hoped to reassemble the breed's genetic jigsaw puzzle as much as possible by mating horses with strong Tarpan blood, creating a look-alike.

The Heck brothers carefully selected horses -- Gotlands, Icelandic ponies and Fjords -- that showed similar bone structure and unusual markings and bred them together. The first "bred-back" Tarpan colt was born in 1933 at the Munich Zoo.

From there, the newly revived Tarpans spread to the United States in the 1950s. Fewer than 100 exist in the country today, and most of them are descended from six original horses brought here from German project.

The Stroebels, however, are challenging the established breeding traditions.

"When Harry died, we just didn't want to see the whole thing go up in smoke and the horses get sold out as riding ponies," said Stroebel.

Like Hegardt, the Stroebels believe that strong Tarpan genes lie hidden in the wild mustang herds of the American West.

That's because those mustangs are descendants of horses that escaped from Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s -- horses which had varying amounts of Tarpan blood. The Stroebels capture horses from the wild and breed them to draw out the ancient characteristics.

In 1993, for example, the Bureau of Land Management helped the Stroebels sort through thousands of horses to find a wild stallion in Utah that reinvigorated their breeding program