Yonaguni horse
critically endangered Japanese breed of small horse
The Yonaguni (Japanese: 与那国馬, yonaguni uma, Yonaguni: Chimanma ) is an endangered Japanese breed of small horse. It is native to Yonaguni Island, in the Yaeyama Islands in south-western Japan, close to Taiwan. It is one of eight horse breeds native to Japan and – like most other Japanese native breeds – is critically endangered.
History
Japanese native horses are thought to derive from stock brought at several different times from various parts of the Asian mainland; the first such importations took place by the sixth century at the latest. Horses were used for farming – as pack-animals although not for draught power; until the advent of firearms in the later sixteenth century, they were much used for warfare. The horses were not large: remains of some 130 horses have been excavated from battlefields dating to the Kamakura period (1185–1333 AD); they ranged from 110 to 140 cm in height at the withers.
In 1968 there were 210 Yonaguni horses. By the early 1980s, the number had fallen to little more than fifty; numbers subsequently recovered slightly. The conservation status of the breed was listed as "critical" by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2007. No population data has been reported to DAD-IS since 2008, when the breed numbered 85 head, up from a low of 48 individuals recorded in 1977.
“Yonaguni horse” enters the record as critically endangered Japanese breed of small horse. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yonaguni, horse and critically can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yonaguni horse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.