[Published: 27-Oct-2000]
Sir, You claim in your article Home From Home for Historic Hill Ponies that Exmoor ponies are rarer than giant pandas. This may well be true, but it is an irrelevant comparison. Exmoor ponies are merely a sub-species of horse. It would certainly be a tragedy if they became extinct, but there would still be horses in the world. Giant pandas, on the other hand, are a unique species. When they become extinct, as they surely must, the world will have lost far more in terms of genetic diversity.