BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
For more than 3,500 years, Dartmoor’s semi-wild ponies have roamed the moor, managed by commoners whose families have worked this land for generations. But now, under new proposals from Natural England and Defra, these endangered ponies face near-extinction, with potential culls of up to 93 per cent, as bureaucratic eco-rules count them alongside commercial livestock for the first time. Campaigners warn that the very policies designed to ‘protect’ nature are destroying one of England’s last truly wild herds.
Behind this disaster lies a familiar pattern: crowd-funded, ka-ching environmental activism that ignores on-the-ground reality, from sheep blinded by corvids to ancient breeds being legislated out of existence.
First, consider the trail of unintended consequences that follows environmental policy like a shadow. The case of Wild Justice, the activist group co-founded by Chris Packham, provides a perfect, if gruesome, example. Their (fortunately, mostly failed) legal campaigns have not only tightened corvid shooting licenses across the countryside—making it nearly impossible for land managers to control burgeoning populations of crows and magpies—but have directly led to a spike in horrific animal welfare incidents. In 2019, following Wild Justice’s legal challenge that forced Natural England to revoke general licences for shooting carrion crows, farmers across the country reported lambs having their eyes pecked out by emboldened corvids. The policy, born of a simplistic urban notion that all wild birds are equally sacred, ignored the real-world consequence: a slow, agonising death for livestock that no court in London will ever have to witness. This is the hallmark of ideology untethered from practical land management.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth about these environmental pressure groups: they are not scientific bodies nor serious land managers, but a religious cult dressed in waterproofs made from oil—the very fossil fuel they claim to despise yet don without a flicker of hypocrisy. They operate on faith, not data. Their central dogma is that nature left entirely alone is a pure, static Eden—a belief that would collapse instantly if any of them had to spend a winter feeding stock on a marginal moor. They have outlier high priests who survive by conjuring audiences through triggering (Packham, George Monbiot), holy texts (rewilding manifestos and ‘peer review’ nonsense heralding from redbrick universities), and a concept of original sin (human intervention).
Reasonable debate is heresy. When a farmer points out that centuries of managed grazing created the very ‘biodiverse’ landscape they claim to worship, the cultist hears only blasphemy. In March 2023, farmers on Dartmoor were told by Natural England they must reduce summer grazing by an average of 75 per cent—in some cases 91 per cent—to remain in government schemes. The NFU has publicly accused Packham of painting a ‘deeply misleading picture’ of upland farming, pointing out that during summer there are only 0.3 animals per hectare on Dartmoor, including ponies. These activists do not understand carrying capacity, vermin control, or the brutal arithmetic of keeping animals alive on poor land. They understand moral purity, the PR of court battles, and fundraising. They are, in essence, the worst possible people to be put in charge of a working landscape—preaching sacrifice from the comfort of a heated electric car, its battery charged by a grid that still burns gas and coal while they lecture the man with calloused hands and a diesel tractor.
Nowhere is this cultish, destructive logic more nakedly displayed than in the current assault on the Dartmoor pony. Under new proposals from Natural England and Defra, commoners are being told to cull their livestock by a staggering 75 per cent. For the first time, the semi-wild ponies—which have roamed this moor for over 3,500 years, since the Bronze Age—will be counted in those grazing restrictions. The result, as campaigners have calculated with horror, is that up to 93 per cent of the remaining 1,000 ponies could be removed. In real terms, that is extinction. The very ponies uniquely adapted to Dartmoor’s marshy terrain, added to the Rare Breed Survival Trust watchlist in 2023 as endangered, are to be sacrificed not for any proven ecological gain, but to make room for commercial cattle grazing preferred by distant bureaucrats. Charlotte Faulkner, the chairman of the Friends of the Dartmoor Hill Pony group, put it with grim irony: there would be a cruel tragedy if, in the name of rewilding, we lost the one genuinely wild thing we have left . The annual October ‘drifts,’ where ponies are rounded up for health checks, would become death marches. The genetic viability of the entire breed—already down from around 7,000 in 1999 to fewer than 1,000 today—would be destroyed . Even the 2023 Fursdon Review, commissioned by Defra itself, warned that ‘ponies and cattle should not be linked for the calculation of stocking rates’ and that Natural England should not take ‘actions likely to result in a reduction in their numbers’. The government is ignoring its own review. Robert Jordan, whose family has farmed here since 1913, knows the truth: the ponies are generational, tied to the people. And those people know the moor better than any campaigner with a Twitter account.
So what next? Wait for a change in government, or submit to the lottery of the courts? The current Labour administration, for all its talk of rural Britain, is proving itself even worse than its predecessors—out of touch, bureaucratic, and happy to let Natural England run roughshod over ancient common rights. They will be out by 2029 at the latest, but the ponies cannot wait that long.
The other option is another judicial review, another expensive dice roll with a High Court judge who has likely never mucked out a stable. In July 2025, Wild Justice took the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council to the High Court, accusing them of allowing overgrazing and ‘neglecting general duties under wildlife laws’. The NFU has defended the commoners, pointing out that upland farmers ‘play a vital role in supporting food security, enhancing biodiversity, and sustaining rural communities’. That is no way to run a countryside. The ponies have survived Bronze Age collapses, Victorian enclosures, and two world wars without the help of these meddling urban saviours. They know best. The only sensible policy is to stop meddling entirely. Let the locals decide. The commoners of Dartmoor have a message for Chris Packham and Wild Justice: you are the ones who need culling, not the ponies. Leave the moor to the people who live on it, and the animals that have shaped it for thirty-five centuries. Talk in the Dartmoor pubs—in jest, of course—is of culling the tin-rattling eco-chuggers, not the herd. And for once, common sense should prevail.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).