Wild Takhis : are they surviving ?
Breaking news from Hustai National Park, Mongolia.
The minimum flight distance is a good indicator of our impact on wild animals.
As I managed, on my first attempt, to approach the Takhis within 5 meters, I wondered whether these horses, after 13 generations in captivity, had not lost their identity in one of Western Europe's zoos...
Hustai National Park, 100 km South West of Ulaan Baatar (Mongolia's capital city), is home to the largest population of wild Takhis in the world, with 199 individuals (as of July 2007).
These are the proud descendants of 84 horses imported between 1992 and 2000 to Mongolia from semi-reserves in The Netherlands, Ukraine and Germany.
The Takhis, also named Przewalski horses after the colonel who discovered them in the late nineteenth century, became extinct in the wild when the last untamed one was sighted in the Gobi desert in 1969.
