The new additions to Kazakhstan’s “golden steppes” may not seem remarkable at first glance, with their donkey-like builds and zebra-like straight manes. But these seven individuals are part of the Przewalski (pronounced pshuh-) breed, the last remaining wild horse species.foot-Ski) known as Kertagi or Kerkulan In Kazakh.
Horses roam freely in many parts of the world, such as the American Great Plains. However, they are wild animals, and as part of a domesticated species, they now live in the wild. The Przewalski horse is a completely different species, with a different number of chromosomes, and it appears that this species was not domesticated by humans.
“They’re truly wild,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist who works with Przewalski’s horses at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. The animals were once an important part of the ecosystem of the Central Asian steppes. But they began to disappear in the 1800s, and by the 1960s, they were extinct in the wild due to humans and environmental changes. Fortunately, about a dozen fertile horses survived in captivity, and their population has recovered through carefully managed breeding. In June of this year, conservationists reintroduced seven of them to the Golden Steppe of Kazakhstan. The horses were flown to a reintroduction center in the steppe, where they are now acclimating to life outside of captivity under the watchful eyes of conservationists.
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Despite their long captivity, Przewalski’s horses have not lost their wild nature. “We don’t try to tame them,” says Barbora Doviasova, curator of hoofed animals at Prague Zoo and head of the European breeding program. “When you enter a herd of Przewalski’s horses… [the stallion] She says, “They’ll always get between you and the mare and try to defend themselves.” The animals have to be tranquilized so zookeepers can trim their hooves.
Golden Steppe, or Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve in Kazakhstan (Altyn dollar (which means “golden steppe” in Kazakh) These horses are galloping and grazing again, filling a hole in the ecosystem, explains Stephanie Ward of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who serves as international coordinator for the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, a conservation partnership with the Kazakh government.
“When you go into the prairie, it’s like you’re in a sea of grass. It all looks the same at first,” she says. But the sea is teeming with life. Birds nest in the underbrush, and burrowing animals tunnel beneath it. Ward explains that large herbivores like horses and antelope historically kept the grass short, keeping it from drying out and allowing other animals to access the ground beneath. Their droppings enriched the soil, and their grazing helped sequester carbon in the soil.
“The grasslands are meant to be grazed,” Ward said. But by the 2000s, many of the large herbivores of the prairies had disappeared or were critically endangered. They included not only the Przewalski’s horse, but also the wild donkey called the kulan and the saiga antelope. “The lack of this has slowly led to the deterioration of the ecosystem. Plant species are becoming fewer and fewer and less resilient,” she said.
But the herbivores are making a comeback, thanks to conservation efforts that go beyond the Przewalski horse. Kazakhstan’s charmingly snub-nosed saiga antelope numbered just 21,000 in 2003. Today, there are more than a million of them spread across the country. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) changed their status from “critically endangered” to “nearly threatened.” The kulan has also been reintroduced periodically since 2017.
Preparing to transport the Przewalski horse, which has been sedated.
Now it’s the Przewalski’s turn. Thanks to captive breeding programs, their numbers have skyrocketed from just 30-40 in the mid-20th century to about 2,500 today. About half of these horses now live in the wild, thanks to reintroductions in Mongolia, China, and Russia since the 1980s. Kazakhstan, however, was not so lucky. An attempt to reintroduce them to a national park in 2003 was unsuccessful. Also, these animals have been missing from the ecosystem for so long that they are not afforded the legal protections that the country needs.
Przewalski’s horse was added to Kazakhstan’s protected species list in 2021, paving the way for the return of wild horses. In early June 2024, seven animals were flown in by military aircraft from the Prague and Berlin zoos. They traveled via Istanbul and Baku, Azerbaijan, to the small Soviet-era airport in Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, which had to be reopened for the event.
Przewalski’s horses are transported to a reintroduction center in Kazakhstan.
From there, it was a seven-hour drive to the reintroduction center, where the fences had been hastily rebuilt after the devastating floods that hit the area in April. The floods destroyed “80 percent of each fence. In fact, we [had] “It’s building from zero,” says Albert Salemgareyev of the Kazakhstan Biodiversity Conservation Society. The floods also washed away roads needed to transport building materials and ultimately horses. “I almost said, ‘No, we can’t do this this year,’ but then I realized how much [work] We really prepared, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll give it my all.'”
Fortunately, the horses named Ypsilonk, Zeta II, Zorro, Tessa, Sary, Wespe, and Umbra arrived in the rebuilt pens as planned, and they will spend most of the next year acclimating to their new surroundings. Salemgareyev and his colleagues will be watching them as they adapt, especially during their first winter.
Two reintroduced Przewalski horses inside a fenced enclosure at the Kazakhstan Reintroduction Center.
The horses have a lot to learn. At the zoo, they were provided with food, water and shade, but now they have to find it themselves, Salemgareyev explains. At first, the team was worried that the mares from Germany wouldn’t drink water, but they have since adapted. “They look really good now,” he says.
By this time next year, the horses will be galloping freely across the prairies, and a variety of plant and animal species will be thriving. The conservation team is tracking the horses’ movements with tracking collars and plans to introduce 30 to 40 more horses to the area in the coming years.
And in zoos around the world, curators like Dobiášová and Ryder will continue to help grow the population and maintain genetic diversity. “The Przewalski’s horse is a remarkable example, and one of the first, of a species that has been saved through managed care and breeding in a zoo,” says Ryder, coordinator of the North American breeding program. Ryder has been working to conserve the species at the San Diego Zoo since the 1970s. His team was the first to clone a Przewalski’s horse in 2020, and a second cloned foal was born last year. Both were cloned from a cell line preserved in 1980 from a stallion named Kuporovich, which had genetic diversity that had likely disappeared from the population today, Ryder says.
“The goal of putting them in a zoo is [is] “It’s about bringing it back to the wild,” says Ryder. “That’s what we should aspire to as a general principle. What we’re trying to do is preserve the legacy of life on Earth.”
