The Terra Nova expedition had dogs as well as ponies and who knows, if they'd been purchased by someone who knew horses, they might've done a lot better.
Scott sent his dog handler Meares to purchase the ponies (and I can't really nail down the breed here, they're either described as Manchurian or Siberian, but they look like Yakut horses[1] in photos), and Scott insisted, for some reason, on white ponies, because he either thought that they did better in cold environments, or were stronger.
And apparently the only white ones available when Meares was purchasing, were old and apparently underfed. Of course, if Captain Oates, an experienced calvary man had accompanied Meares as Scott requested, he could've chosen good ones. It also didn't help that the horses had their summer coats when they arrived in Antarctica.
Also, they did eventually shoot the ponies to store as meat in caches when they had lost condition.
Many other polar explorers, both Arctic and Antarctic, used ponies successfully. When fed correctly. Meet Ernest Shackleton's meat eating pony, Socks, part of an expedition in 1907. [2]
Shackleton fed his horses "Maujee pemmican", which, according to him "consists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants and sugar, and it provides a large amount of nourishment with comparatively little weight."
Scott, however, while replicating Shackleton's use of ponies, didn't feed them the same rations, preferring compressed wheat.
The Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic (the one that found Fridtjof Nansen) used ponies.
Wilhem Filchner used ponies successfully in Antarctica around the same time as Scott was dying, to the extent that he was able to release them on South Georgia Island after the expedition.
Scott sent his dog handler Meares to purchase the ponies (and I can't really nail down the breed here, they're either described as Manchurian or Siberian, but they look like Yakut horses[1] in photos), and Scott insisted, for some reason, on white ponies, because he either thought that they did better in cold environments, or were stronger.
And apparently the only white ones available when Meares was purchasing, were old and apparently underfed. Of course, if Captain Oates, an experienced calvary man had accompanied Meares as Scott requested, he could've chosen good ones. It also didn't help that the horses had their summer coats when they arrived in Antarctica.
Also, they did eventually shoot the ponies to store as meat in caches when they had lost condition.
Many other polar explorers, both Arctic and Antarctic, used ponies successfully. When fed correctly. Meet Ernest Shackleton's meat eating pony, Socks, part of an expedition in 1907. [2]
Shackleton fed his horses "Maujee pemmican", which, according to him "consists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants and sugar, and it provides a large amount of nourishment with comparatively little weight."
Scott, however, while replicating Shackleton's use of ponies, didn't feed them the same rations, preferring compressed wheat.
The Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic (the one that found Fridtjof Nansen) used ponies.
Wilhem Filchner used ponies successfully in Antarctica around the same time as Scott was dying, to the extent that he was able to release them on South Georgia Island after the expedition.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse
[2]: http://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/1...