Pripyat Horses Courses

Pripyat, an abandoned city in northern Ukraine, still has a few hardy inhabitants - the horses that roam the streets and graze on the overgrown vegetation. These horses have been living wild for a decade and remain an eerie reminder of human abandonement. The horses are a somber testament to the tragedy that befell the city of Pripyat, the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. After the meltdown, the city of roughly 49,000 people had to be evacuated immediately and the horses were left to their own devices in the face of extreme radiation levels. It is thought that some of the horses were survivors of the disaster itself: it is understood that some horses were partially blinded by radiation though there exists no proof of this. Nevertheless, the horses have proven to be an exception to the rule, surviving and thriving amidst the dangerous levels of radiation. Recently, the horses have become something of a tourist attraction for the brave souls who venture near the site of the disaster- with the view of the strange wilderness of the now-abandoned city and the wild horses of Pripyat in the background. Reinforcing the sense of abandonment and tragedy, their mostly gray color is a far cry from their healthy, likely cheerful and almost certainly colorful pasts. While they were once dappled and white, they have now adopted a somber hue that mirrors the deeply depressing consequences of the tragedy that befell the people of Pripyat. Nonetheless, research has shown that the herd is thriving and is fairly young- with some of the horses born after the disaster itself. The horses have a surprisingly low level of inbreeding- indicating the existence of a strong gene pool - a remarkable feat for who, for all intents and purposes, had been left to their own devices.