Wild horses return to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries – Guardian
A community of the area’s last wild horses delight in returned to their native Kazakhstan after an absence of about 200 years. The seven horses, four mares from Berlin and a stallion and two other mares from Prague, were flown to the central Asian nation on a Czech air pressure transport plane.
The wild horses, identified as Przewalski’s horses, as soon as roamed the mountainous steppe grasslands of central Asia, the set horses are believed to were first domesticated about 5,500 years ago.
Other folks are identified to were riding and milking horses in northern Kazakhstan nearly 2,000 years forward of the first records of domestication in Europe. Human exercise, alongside side searching the animals for their meat, as neatly as street building, which fragmented their population, drove the horses shut to extinction within the 1960s.
Filip Mašek, Prague zoo’s spokesperson, acknowledged: “These are the acceptable last wild horses on this planet. Mustangs are domesticated horses that went wild.”
The horses reintroduced into Kazakhstan are descended from two groups that survived in Munich and Prague zoos.
In the initiating, eight horses had been scheduled to hurry, acknowledged Mašek, nevertheless one horse sat down forward of the flight from Prague and wanted to be unloaded and returned to Prague zoo.
“He became honest a minute dizzy returning, nevertheless he is k now. These horses delight in to stand for the total rush – they would possibly be able to’t sit down down, mainly because their blood wishes to waft into nicely. It’s miles a 30-hour rush in total, and the horses will perfect dwell on within the occasion that they stand the total methodology,” he acknowledged.
Returning the horses from Prague zoo would support lengthen biodiversity within the location, acknowledged Mašek. “The horses unfold seeds in their dung and after they dig up vegetation, they support the water get down into the soil. They furthermore fertilise the steppe with their dung.
“For me”, he acknowledged, “the target of a recent zoo is no longer honest about protecting and breeding endangered species, it’s some distance about returning them to the wild the set they belong.”
Prague zoo’s director, Miroslav Bobek, acknowledged the horses’ arrival became “practically a miracle”, given the reasonably short preparation for the relocation and unexpected floods in central Kazakhstan last month.
“Here is the origin of a complete modern chapter within the memoir of the last wild horse on the earth,” he acknowledged in a snarl.
In 2011, Prague zoo became fervent on a reintroduction of Przewalski’s horses to Mongolia. The project, which fervent nine flights of horses, persisted unless 2019 when the population stabilised, acknowledged Mašek, alongside side that there were now about 1,500 of the wild horses in Mongolia.
Mašek acknowledged the conception became to transport a total of 40 horses to central Kazakhstan over the next five years.
This first stage of the horse reintroduction fervent the Kazakh authorities’s forestry and natural world committee, Prague zoo, Tierpark Berlin zoo, Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan.
