Mustangs aren’t “wild” animals. They’re domesticated animals that have been allowed to run feral.
There’s a difference.
Take the dog vs. the wolf.
You can adopt feral dogs and domesticate them again. You can do this especially well with puppies. Likewise, you can train up mustangs from foals to do what domestic horses do - just as you’d train any horse.
Where you have a truly wild animal (eg, the wolf), no matter how you care for an adopted pup, there comes that day when the pup realizes it is a wild animal and it starts to tear your house apart, eat the cat and start looking at humans as food. That’s a wild animal.
There haven’t been any “wild” horses in North America for about 8,000 years or so.
So how do the leading zoologists trace the horse into North America? Perhaps they came over a land bridge?
>There haven’t been any “wild” horses in North America for about 8,000 years or so.<
Mustangs, IMO, have reverted to being wild animals. I’ve owned two of them and they both became good working horses.
If they’re living wild, they are wild versus tame, which is what I meant. Calling them “feral” is a bit pedantic; the wolf and even the cat are examples, since we have domestic forms of both (Canis lupus familiaris and Felis silvestris catus) that can interbreed with their wild counterparts and produce fertile offspring.