THE SHACKLEFORD HORSES
The Shackleford Banks wild horses are a unique historic and cultural legacy, as well as natural and scientific resource. Living on Shackleford Banks, the southernmost island of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, the wild herd on Shackleford is related to the other equine inhabitants that live along the barrier islands of the Eastern United States. Historical research documents the presence of the wild horses along the Outer Banks, and that research along with genetics testing indicates that these wild horses descended from an old type of Colonial Spanish horses. One genetic factor, the blood variant Q-ac, is believed to be contributed by the Spanish horses. This genetic marker has been found in only descendants of those Spanish horses. Easily lost through genetic drift, Q-ac has been documented in the Puerto Rican Paso Finos, the isolated mustang population of Montana's Pryor Mountains, and the wild horses of Shackleford Banks, making them an important and rare equine population to preserve and protect.
The wild horses of Shackleford Banks are of great interest to the scientific community as well as to the average citizen. An international expert of equine behavior, D. I. Rubenstein, PhD, Chairman, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and his graduate students have been studying and documenting the social behavior of these wild horses for nearly three decades. Dr. Rubenstein has kept a genealogy on the horses based on the dams of each succeeding generation of foals (called “matrilineages”).
In addition, equine genetics experts, including those at the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, and the University of California at Davis, believe in the importance of assuring the long-term survival of this unique, hardy group of wild Banker horses, and have assisted the Park and the Foundation in helping to make management decisions to ensure the genetic diversity of the herd.
Horses removed from the island that were found to be inapparent carriers of Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA) have been turned over to the Foundation, to be cared for at a state-approved quarantine site. Study of those horses, who have survived for decades without exhibiting symptoms of the disease, has been a source a valuable information for equine disease researchers at the University of Kentucky, and may advance their progress toward finding an eventual cure for EIA.