My second story is about a very small and very beautiful breed of horse and an American woman, Louise Firouz, who “discovered” and rescued the animals from obscurity in Iran. Louise had married a young man from the Iranian royal family, Narcy Firouz, and had become a princess. In 1957 the young couple established the Norouzabad Equestrian Center, where the wealthier Iranian families sent their children to learn to ride. But the horses were typically too big for the smaller children, including their own three. And so when, in 1965, Louise heard rumors of a small pony in the Elburz Mountains near the Caspian Sea, she determined to investigate. She set out on horseback with a few women friends, and she found the “ponies.” They were being used as work animals, pulling carts, malnourished and covered with ticks.
Almost at once Louise realized that these were not ponies at all—they had the distinctive gait, temperament, and facial bone structure of horses. Very small, narrow horses to be sure, standing just over 40 inches, but horses for all that.
As she pondered the nature of this little horse, Louise suddenly remembered seeing, on the walls of the ancient palace in Persepolis, relief carvings of a horse that looked very much like the one she had just found. The Lydian horse depicted in those carvings had the same small, prominent skull formation. With a sense of excitement, Louise began to wonder whether, hidden beneath the matted coats of these work animals, was a true representative of the ancient lost breed of the royals, considered extinct for a thousand years. She found that there were still five purebred horses in the village, and she bought three of them. After extensive DNA testing, archaeozoologists and genetic specialists agreed with Louise that these animals were indeed Caspian horses, the ancestral form of the Arabian horse. What an incredible find!
At first Louise and Narcy financed the breeding themselves, but then in 1970 a Royal Horse Society was formed in Iran. The society’s mission was to protect Iran’s native breeds, and it bought all of Louise’s Caspian horses, which by then numbered 23. Louise and Narcy then started a second, private herd near the Turkmenistan border. When two mares and a foal were killed by wolves, Louise, wanting to ensure that some of the horses would be kept safe, arranged for eight of them to be exported to Britain in 1977. The Royal Horse Society was angered, presumably because it had not been consulted. The society immediately banned all further exports of Caspian horses and began collecting up all of the animals that remained in Iran, including all but one of the Firouzes’ second herd.
Then came the 1979 Islamic revolution. Because of their connections with the royal family, the Firouzes were imprisoned. Narcy was jailed for six months, but Louise for only a few weeks, for she remembered advice given to her by a friend: that if she went to prison, she should go on a hunger strike. This worked, but during that time most of the Caspian horses were auctioned for use as beasts of burden or slaughtered for meat.
Still passionate about saving her beloved Caspian horses, Louise managed to rescue some of those that remained from starvation and slaughter and established, for the third time, a small herd in Iran. And once again she managed to export some of them to safety.
The last such effort was in the early 1990s, when Louise sent seven horses on a dangerous journey to the United Kingdom. They had to pass through the Belarus war zone, where bandits attacked and robbed the convoy. The horses arrived safely, but it had been a costly business. Soon after, in 1994, Louise’s husband died, and she could no longer afford her breeding program.
With Iran’s many political upheavals—the overthrow of the shah, the Iran-Iraq war, the very real threat of famine—as well as the Caspian’s former association with royalty—the fate of these horses was ever in the balance. One moment they were considered a national treasure, the next they were seized as wartime food. But thanks to Louise Firouz, who had exported a total of nine stallions and seventeen mares, the future of this ancient line has been ensured. Today they can be found in England, France, Australia, Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the United States.
From Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued From the Brink, by Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson. Copyright © 2009 by Jane Goodall and Thane Maynard. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.