Galloping on the wild side
QUESTION Which country has the largest population of wild horses?
The wild horse ( equus ferus) is a species of the genus equus, which includes as a subspecies the modern domesticated horse ( equus ferus caballus).
The only species of genuinely wild horse found today is Przewalski’s horse ( Equus
ferus przewalskii), named after Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski, who visited China at the end of the 19th century.
In the late 18th century, herds of Przewalski’s horses ranged from the Russian steppes east to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northern China.
But their numbers declined rapidly in the 19th century as they fell victim to hunting, harsh winters and humans taking over their roaming lands.
In 1950, there were just 12 Przewalski’s horses, all in zoos.
But an ambitious breeding programme brought the number up to 1,500 wild animals living in the steppes of Mongolia by the early Nineties.
horses in an untamed state with domesticated ancestors are not wild horses, but feral.
When the Spanish reintroduced the horse to the Americas from the late 15th century, some of the animals escaped, forming feral herds, the best-known being the mustang.
Australia has the largest population of feral horses in the world, with up to 500,000. Known as the Brumby, they are descendants of horses brought there by english settlers.
Their name is something of a mystery, with several possible derivations. One source is Sgt James Brumby, who is said to have freed the animals when he left his property at Mulgrave Place in New South Wales to move to Tasmania in 1804.
Another explanation is that it is derived from an aboriginal word, perhaps baroomby meaning ‘wild’ in the language of the Pitjara indigenous Australians in southern Queensland.
Jeremy Wilson, Ipswich, Suffolk.
QUESTION Was James Cameron’s underwater film The Abyss filmed in an abandoned nuclear power plant?
The Abyss, released in 1989, was an ambitious sci-fi film written and directed by James Cameron and starring ed harris and Mary elizabeth Mastrantonio.
They were part of a diving team searching for a lost nuclear submarine, who face danger while encountering aliens.
Much of the action was filmed in huge water tanks at the abandoned Cherokee nuclear power plant in South Carolina.
Two specially constructed tanks were used for filming. The first, based on the abandoned plant’s primary reactor containment vessel, held 6.25 million gallons of water and was 55ft deep and 209ft wide. The second, an unused turbine pit, held two million gallons.
The principal actors had to become fully qualified divers and everyone involved in filming had to be able to work underwater.
The shoot was horrendous, averaging 15 to 18 hours a day. When filming underwater, the crew were typically 30ft deep.
halfway through the production, a lightning storm destroyed the tarpaulin that covered the main tank. From then on, all the action was filmed at night.
At one point, Mastrantonio allegedly walked out of a scene in tears, shouting: ‘We are not animals!’
ed harris has claimed he pulled over to the side of the road one night and began weeping due to the stress of the shoot.
Ali Moorhead, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.
QUESTION Did the writer Charles Dickens have a stalker?
IN NOVEMBER 1867, Charles Dickens undertook a reading tour of Boston, arranged and financed by the leading U.S. publisher Fields, Osgood & Co.
It was here he encountered Jane Bigelow, who would give him much unwanted attention.
The stately Parker house hotel in downtown Boston was Dickens’s residence for the tour. John and Jane Bigelow of New York were also staying there. The couple dined with Dickens, his manager and publisher and played parlour games, such as history, a whispering game.
In a varied and illustrious career, John Bigelow had been managing editor and co-owner of the New York evening Post, President Lincoln’s consul general and the minister to France.
however, Jane was said to be unsuited to diplomatic life. She once offended the Prince of Wales by slapping him on the back and her husband was said to have lost various diplomatic posts because of her crass behaviour.
Boston socialite Annie Fields, wife of the publisher James T. Fields, recorded in her diary that Dickens had ‘the deepest sympathy for men who are unfitly married and has taken an especial fancy I think to John Bigelow, our late minister to Paris, who is here, because his wife is such an incubus (a demon)’.
he saw his own wife, Catherine, mother of his ten children, as being weak-minded and embarrassing.
Dickens was at the Westminster hotel in New York when a ‘little widow’ named Mrs hertz, who was a friend of the hotel manager, wanted to meet him and give him flowers. She was brought into his room for a private meeting.
When she left, Jane Bigelow was waiting in the hall. She physically assaulted the widow while screaming about the woman’s ‘daring’ at having entered Dickens’s room alone.
For the rest of the tour, guards had to be placed outside the author’s quarters to stop harassment from fans — most notably Jane, who attempted to visit him on several occasions.
Mary Simeon, London SE14.
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