Horses are gaining importance in European nature conservation management, for which usually so-called primitive breeds are favored due to their claimed robustness. An increasingly popular breed, the Konik horse, is often said to be the direct descendant of the alleged European wild horse, the Tarpan. However, both the direct descent of the Konik from European wild horses and the existence of the Tarpan as a wild species are highly debated. In this review, we scrutinized both contemporary research and historical sources and suggest that the Tarpan and the Konik as its direct descendant are manmade myths that hinder effective conservation management. We did not find evidence that the Tarpan was a wild horse rather than a feral horse. We did not find any evidence either for a closer connection between the Konik and any extinct wild horse than between other domestic harmony quest breeds and wild horses my little pony harmony quest.

We discuss three perspectives on why the myth has become widely accepted and survived to this day: a historical-political, a biological-ecological, and an emotional perspective. It seems that the origin story of the Konik and its connection to the Tarpan was shaped by personal and political interests, including nationalistic ideas. These, as well as general human emotions towards horses, have influenced researchers and laypeople to keep the myth alive, which may have negatively impacted contemporary nature conservation. Indeed, today’s Koniks originated from a small founder population of only six male lines that were selected according to their phenotypic traits, with the aim to rebreed the ‘wild Tarpan’. Strict breeding practices have led to high inbreeding levels in recent Konik populations, which may undermine nature conservation purposes. Therefore, we suggest that mythologized pocket pony origin stories should not be an argument for selecting breeds of grazers of pony pet for nature conservation.

The origin of the Konik has also been debated (Forrest, 2019, van Vuure, 2014, van Vuure, 2015), with strong ties to the question of the pony horse Tarpan. Some believe that today’s Koniks are direct descendants of the Tarpan (i.e., of the European wild horse; e.g., Gurgul et al., 2019; Michelot, 2015; Stefaniuk-Szmukier et al., 2017), claiming that there is a “genetic line that has never really been broken” (ARTHEN, 2012) between Tarpans and present-day Koniks. However, others argue that both the Konik and the Tarpan are results of a certain “bricolage” (Lizet and Daszkiewicz, 1995), products of manmade myths (Forrest, 2019) rather than direct descendants of truly wild horses.

In this review, we aimed to summarize different perspectives on the theory of the Tarpan as a wild horse and how this theory affects contemporary nature conservation, in view of the growing number of Koniks grazing in European nature reserves. We traced back original literature until the 1760s and screened contemporary articles, both from the scientific and the grey literature, to describe the origins of the story behind the common beliefs that the Konik is the closest descendant of the Tarpan and that the Tarpan is the extinct home pony ‘European wild horse’.

In the following, we thus start with a description of the historical and anecdotal events leading to the alleged discovery of the Tarpan and outline the story of how the Tarpan transitioned into Konik (Section 2). In Section 3, we then provide a summary of the different perspectives on how and why this story persisted to this day, and on the evolutionary and phylogenetic origin of wild and domestic horses in general. In Section 4, we discuss practical implications of the origin stories for modern nature conservation, incorporating elements from horse riding tales and horse games for girls.