Wild horses have returned to the Golden Steppe of Kazakhstan for the primary time in at the very least 200 years after a decades-long reintroduction programme.
The 18-hour airlifts of seven Przewalski’s Horses from Europe to the Central Asian nation occurred throughout two operations in early June by the Prague Zoo.
The horses up to now are doing nicely, roaming across the plains of their new atmosphere, caretakers advised the BBC. Their return to their ancestral homeland final week is a triumph of generations of conservation work, the zoo’s director, Miroslav Bobek, stated.
“[The mare named] Tessa was the primary to expire of the transport field into the pen, then Wespe, adopted by Umbra, and Sary introduced the foursome to a detailed,” he added.
The Przewalski’s horse is the final wild horse species on the planet, named after Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski who was the primary to determine the horse for the European science neighborhood.
The breed originated millennia in the past from the steppes of Central Asia and was taken by researchers to Europe and North America within the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries, the place it based bigger populations.
A few of them ended up in zoos in Munich and Prague – it is their descendants which have now been reintroduced in Kazakhstan.
Cultural artefacts present individuals within the area have been using and utilizing the horses for meals in northern Kazakhstan at the very least 2,000 years earlier than the primary information of domesticated horses in Europe.
However by the point Przewalski, a geographer, found them, the wild populations in Asia have been already dying out. They have been discovered solely in a small part of western Mongolia.
“The seven horses that we transported right here by two Czech Military planes characterize the primary people of this species in central Kazakhstan in a whole lot of years,” Mr Bobek stated.
The Prague Zoo was on the centre of worldwide efforts to avoid wasting the horses after World Conflict Two, once they have been entrusted with the “worldwide studship” of the breed.
Przewalski’s horses have lengthy been thought-about the primary remaining true wild horse; species such because the American mustang and Australian brumby are feral horses descended from domesticated animals.
They’re shorter and stockier than fashionable domesticated horses and their genetic variations present that neither species are ancestors of the opposite.
Prague Zoo, which has spent the previous decade and a half introducing the horses again to Central Asia, primarily in Mongolia, stated the Kazakhstan operations had been within the plans since 2022.
Final week noticed the fruits of years of labor. The six mares and one stallion have been chosen from completely different programmes round Europe and put collectively in the identical zoo in Berlin – Tierpark Berlin – for a number of months to grow to be acquainted earlier than their journey.
That then kicked off in early June, with navy airplanes flying the standing horses in two teams on a 6,000km-route that included stopovers in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
As soon as they touched floor on the Arkalyk Airport in Kazakhstan, they have been taken on an eight-hour drive to the plains the place they have been then lastly launched onto the Altyn Dala – the Kazakh title for the Golden Steppe.
“Our aim is to slowly transport at the very least 40 people right here, so {that a} viable inhabitants may be arrange,” Mr Bobek stated.
The mares have been launched in a unique paddock to the primary group containing the stallion to attempt to guarantee genetic variety.
“Ideally, sooner or later, they are going to kind a harem with one other stallion in order that there will likely be extra stallions breeding proper from the beginning,” Mr Bobek stated.
It had all the time been the zoo’s dream, he added, to launch the horses again into their native lands: “Hardly something might be a greater demonstration of the aim of contemporary zoos than the return of the Wild Horses.”
