When The Ponies Are Useful: The RSPB's Curious Silence On Dartmoor

Any one who has been to Geltsdale recently will have seen the materials describing their ponies as a conservation success story.

Having taken over what it describes as a former grouse moor and sheep farm, the charity explains that it reduced sheep grazing and switched to cattle and ponies, which "graze in a different way to sheep, helping to create a more varied mix of ground vegetation".

Elsewhere on the reserve, it tells us, ponies are put to work reducing bracken cover to make space for tree seedlings and feeding grounds for Black Grouse.

The odd thing however with this story is, according to those who live in the area, the RSPB were unable to find a local shepherd willing to put his sheep on the RSPB land after the criticism the charity had thrown at sheep grazing previously, hence the had to shift to ponies.

Ponies do graze differently to sheep. They tackle the coarse, rank vegetation that other livestock leave behind. They open up ground and create the varied sward that upland wildlife depends on. On this, the RSPB is correct.

Which raises an obvious question. If the RSPB understands all of this so well that it builds a flagship reserve story around it, where is that voice now, when semi-wild ponies two hundred miles south face the most serious threat to their future in a generation?

On Dartmoor, the semi-wild hill pony population has become the subject of a bitter and very public row. At the heart of it is a decision by Natural England to include ponies in the same stocking density calculations as commercially grazed cattle and sheep, while requiring graziers to cut overall animal numbers substantially in order to keep qualifying for public funding.

The consequence is not hard to follow. Faced with a shrinking number of permitted grazing animals, and needing the commercial income that only cattle and sheep provide, graziers are placed under pressure to reduce the one animal on the moor that earns them nothing: the pony.

Natural England insists it has not ordered a cull, and technically that is true. But the independent Fursdon Review, commissioned by Defra itself, was explicit that Dartmoor's pony population is "invaluable for conservation grazing and genetically important", that ponies and cattle should not be linked for the calculation of stocking rates, and that Natural England should not take actions likely to result in a reduction in their numbers.

Natural England has pressed ahead regardless. The Dartmoor Hill Pony Association, the Countryside Alliance, local commoners and cross-party MPs have all raised the alarm. The population, fewer than a thousand breeding mares and classed as endangered, has existed on Dartmoor for longer than England has existed as a country.

This is precisely the kind of upland grazing question the RSPB positions itself as an authority on. It is the same ecological argument the charity makes for its own ponies at Geltsdale, only in reverse: remove the ponies, and you lose the very grazing that keeps rank vegetation in check and biodiversity alive. If the principle is worth boasting about in the North Pennines, it is surely worth defending in Devon.

And yet, on the specific threat to Dartmoor's ponies, the RSPB has had remarkably little to say. When the charity has spoken about Dartmoor, it has tended to line up behind Natural England.

In 2023, as farmers and MPs pushed back against the regulator over grazing reductions, the RSPB publicly warned against "political interference" in Natural England's work, insisting the regulator must be allowed to do its job.

That is a legitimate position to hold. But it sits awkwardly beside the charity's enthusiasm for ponies elsewhere. When it comes to defending its own grazing model on its own reserve, the RSPB is vocal and proud. When it comes to a policy that threatens the same animals, on the same ecological logic, in a community that depends on them, the charity that claims to speak for nature has gone quiet.

Local communities do not have that luxury. For the commoners and graziers of Dartmoor, this is not a press release. It is their livelihood, their heritage, and a way of life that has shaped that landscape for thousands of years. They are the ones left to explain why the ponies must go, while national conservation bodies that understand exactly what is at stake decline to spend any of their considerable influence defending them.

There is a further consequence that ought to trouble the RSPB more than most, because it concerns the issue the charity has spent years warning about: fire.

Grazing is not simply a matter of biodiversity. It is one of the few practical tools available to keep the level of vegetation on our uplands in check. Ponies, cattle and sheep eat back the coarse growth that would otherwise accumulate year on year. On Dartmoor, that means the rank molinia grass and encroaching gorse that graziers themselves have warned build up into a standing fuel load when animal numbers are cut too far. Take the grazers off the hill, and the fuel does not disappear. It dries out each summer and waits for a spark.

The RSPB knows this landscape burns. Yet its instinct on grazing has consistently been to criticise, campaign against and call for reductions, treating fewer animals as a near-automatic good. There is a legitimate argument about intensive sheep grazing in the wrong places, and the RSPB is right that overgrazing has damaged parts of our uplands. But grazing done well is not the enemy of the moor. It is part of how the moor is kept safe. A charity that champions cattle and ponies on its own reserves to control vegetation, while lending its weight to reductions elsewhere, is pulling in two directions at once, and it is upland communities who will live with the wildfire risk if the balance is got wrong.

The Dartmoor ponies sit squarely in the middle of this. They are, on the RSPB's own logic, one of the animals best suited to eating down exactly the vegetation that fuels upland fires. Removing them does not only cost the moor a grazer and a piece of living heritage. It removes one of the tools that keeps the fuel load down. That is a strange outcome for anyone who claims to care about the future of these landscapes to stay silent about.

The RSPB cannot have it both ways. It cannot celebrate ponies as conservation heroes when they graze RSPB land, and then fall silent when those same animals are threatened by a policy it has broadly endorsed. Either the ecological case for hill ponies matters, or it does not.