Known as Przewalski’s Horse in the West, and takhi in Mongolia, these dun-coloured, black-maned equids are the only wild horses left in the world. The so-called wild horses that abound in Australia and North America’s western plains and East Coast barrier islands actually feral horses – that is, domestic stock that escaped from ranches and farms and returned to the wild. Although takhi and domestic horses can look alike, the two are distinct species (Equus feruus przewalskii and Equus caballus, respectively). They are very closely related, however; another subspecies of E. ferus called the tarpan was the forebear of the domestic horse.

The horse is an integral part of Mongolian culture. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Chinggis Khaan and his descendants triumphantly rode horses while building the largest empire in history, a swath of land sweeping from China to Europe. Today, children learn to ride when they are only four or five years old, and about half of Mongolia’s 2.4 million people are semi-nomadic and support themselves by breeding domestic animals. “That is their wealth and security,” says Ryder. While all horses are important to the Mongolians, takhi are especially dear to them: “Takhi” means “spirit” or “spiritual” in Mongolian, and the species is a symbol of their national heritage.

Distinguished from domestic horses in part by their thicker necks, shorter legs, and zebra-like erect mane, takhi were last seen in the wild during the 1960s in the Gobi, which accounts for roughly the southern third of Mongolia. Many people think the Gobi is just a huge desert. However, unlike the Sahara, only a tiny part of it is a sandy desert. While the Gobi is extremely dry, the region also has springs, steppes, forests, and high mountains, and supports a great diversity of mammals, from the Asian wild ass and Siberian ibex to wolves and snow leopards. Like the takhi before them, many of these species are declining and may be on their way to extinction.

One of the main reasons that the takhi died out in the Gobi is that increasing of people and livestock drove these shy, wary animals away from the area’s few waterholes. Unfortunately, some believe that Western collectors, who killed and dispersed many adults in pursuit of foals, may have accelerated the takhi’s demise in the wild.

However, zoos saved the takhi from dying out altogether by breeding the species. All of the approximately 1,200 takhi alive today are descended from 12 that were caught in the wild around 1900. Species that are reduced to such small populations can lose much of their genetic diversity, which in turn can make the adults less fertile and the young less likely to survive. And as if one round of drastic population decrease wasn’t enough of an impediment to conserving takhi, the species went through another round during World War II: in 1945, there were once again only 12 breeding takhi in the world.

This history notwithstanding, today’s takhi population enjoys remarkably good genetic health, thanks to zoo propagation strategies, such as avoiding inbreeding and ensuring that rare genes are not lost. The two largest of the four breeding programmes are the Species Survival Plan (SSP) in North America, which has about 190 takhi in 21 zoos, including the NZP’s Conservation and Research Centre at Front Royal, Virginia, and the European equivalent (EEP), which has about 600 takhi in 16 countries. The other two breeding programmes are in Holland and Australia. In addition, the San Diego Zoo has frozen cell lines from about 500 takhi, which, Ryder suggests, could be used for cloning someday.

While breeding takhi in zoos has been a tremendous success, the ultimate goal of a breeding programme is to re-establish free-ranging, self-sustaining populations of the species in the wild. Unfortunately, rather than coordinating with each other, each breeding programme has promoted its own idea for how and where to reintroduce the species, say Dutch biologists Machteld van Dierendonck and Michiel Wallis de Vries in a 1996 paper in the journal Conservation Biology.

The question of where to reintroduce takhi arises in part because there is no consensus on the species’ historical habitat. Some biologists say that takhi belong in the Gobi, claiming that those that died out there were the last of a population that once flourished in this arid habitat. Others counter that takhi belong in the grassy steppes, claiming that those living in the Gobi were a remnant population from the steppes that were forced into marginal habitat. “I don’t think the debate really matters,” says Lee Boyd of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, who co-edited a book on the species (Przewalski’s Horse: The History and Biology of an Endangered Species, 1994 SUNY Press). “I don’t think we’ll ever really know. They could have been that broadly distributed [and lived in both the Gobi and the steppe].”

In the end, simply reintroducing the takhi back to Mongolia may be the most important issue. The contrast between the cushy conditions of zoos and those of their native land could hardly be greater. An Alaska-sized country sandwiched between China and the former Soviet Union, Mongolia is a land of extremes: summer temperatures can soar to 104 degrees Farenheit, while winter temperatures can plunge to 50 below zero. Every five years or so, winter sleet storms called zud encase the vegetation in ice, causing starvation and mass deaths of grazing animals.

Yet the sturdy takhi once flourished in Mongolia, and from a purely biological standpoint, reintroducing them should be simple. There are plenty of takhi in zoos around the world, and their needs and behaviours are relatively well understood. In an ideal world, we should be able to release takhi in Mongolia and let them take it from there.

But while conservation is a noble endeavour, things done in the name of conservation are not necessarily noble. “Often, the initiating organisations have hidden agendas unrelated to the principal goal of the conservation effort,” admonishes van Dierendonck and de Vries in the Conservation Biology paper.

The takhi world is rife with tales of dirty dealings. A prime example is the story of the race between a number of foreign groups to reintroduce the species. Being first was a sure way to curry favour with the Mongolians, who, upon winning their freedom after some 65 years of Soviet rule in 1990, wanted to bring takhi back in the country in time for the next Naadam Festival, a celebration of national pride that features wrestling, archery, and horse racing.

However, with the costs of transporting and maintaining takhi, bringing them back to Mongolia was an expensive proposition, and the new government was in no position to foot the bill. The story goes that Christian Oswald – a German businessman who exports from Mongolia antlers, exotic meats, and other raw materials for his wildlife-derived products business – promised the Mongolians that he would be the first to bring takhi back.

But first does not necessarily mean best, and Oswald’s attempt to reintroduce takhi in the Gobi has had one problem after another. The Ukraine, which participates in the European breeding programme, sent five takhi in1992 and an additional eight in 1993. Before releasing zoo-bred animals to the wild, biologists recommend an acclimation period in a fenced enclosure. However, Oswald’s site, which he named Takhiin Tal (Mongolian for “Valley of the Wild Horses”), is not the best: forage is scarce, the wind chill is fierce during the winter, and, perhaps worst of all, the enclosure has only one stream, and even that is dry during most of the year.

Moreover, the Takhiin Tal programme failed to anticipate that a single enclosure would not suit the takhi’s social system. As is true of domestic horses, male takhi vie for females and for resources such as food and water. During the first years of the programme, the dominant stallion and his mare defended the relatively forage- and water-rich area near the stream, and a number of the excluded takhi died, according to a United Nations Development Plan Biodiversity Project report by a team of international takhi experts.

Taking umbrage at this report, Oswald took it upon himself to disparage the investigating experts in an open letter to all members of the Euroepan takhi captive breeding programme. In a rebuke to Oswald, Mongolian Minister of Nature and Environment, Zambyn Batjargal, said that takhi reintroduction should not be “an arena of competition between foreign” interests.

While the EEP provided the initial takhi for the Takhiin Tal programme, it has not sent any since. Likewise, the SSP has not sent any takhi to Mongolia. The Australians did give Oswald seven mares, but some suspect that their motives were questionable – they were lobbying Mongolia to cast its vote for Sydney as host of the summer Olympics in the year 2000. (For the record, Mongolia voted for Sydney.)

Since 1993, the Takhiin Tal programme has improved. The stallions have separate enclosures so that none will be victimised by the others, and the Mongolian staff supplies food and water daily. But even so, there is little hope that the Takhiin Tal programme will be able to reintroduce takhi into the wild. Although the Gobi may be a good place for takhi in theory, the factors that led to the species’ demise have not been alleviated. If anything, the situation in the Gobi has worsened: the military grazes more than 5,000 head of domestic livestock there year-round, and nomads graze about 75,000 head there during the winter. Some fear that overgrazing will turn the Gobi into a Sahara-type desert.

Right now, the best hope for successfully reintroducing takhi is a programme in the Khustain Nuruu Steppe Reserve, which lies in the low, rolling mountains of central Mongolia, and was historically protected as a khaan [king’s] hunting preserve. The reserve’s takhi reintroduction programme is a joint effort of the Mongolian Association for Conservation of Nature and the Environment (a non-governmental conservation organisation) and the Foundation Reserves for the Przewalski Horse (a private Dutch group that manages takhi in the Netherlands and Germany).

Life is good for the takhi at Khustain Nuruu during the summer, when the streams flow freely and the mountains are green with forage. Since the programme’s establishment in the early 1990s, three harems have been released from their initial acclimation enclosures and are faring well in the wild. Notably, although the frozen, windy winters can be particularly hard on nursing mothers and foals, more than a quarter of the 56 takhi in the reserve were born in Mongolia.

While Washburn University’s Boyd, who does field studies of the takhi at the reserve, feels positive about the Khustain Nuruu reintroduction, she is the first to admit that it is not without potential problems. Chief among them is the reserve’s proximity to domestic horses. When domestic horses mate with takhi, they produce fertile hybrids that could dilute the takhi’s bloodline. First-generation hybrids can look exactly like pure-bred takhi, and the only way to differentiate between them is genetic testing: takhi have 66 chromosomes, domestic horses have 64, and hybrids have 65.

Reserve wardens do all they can to prevent hybridisation, including riding geldings when in the reserve, driving domestic horses out of the reserve, and escorting the nomads and their livestock during their annual migrations through the reserve. In addition, all of the takhi are individually recognised and named. But someday, there could be so many takhi in Khustain Nuruu that they will come and go as they please, and keeping tabs on them individually will not be feasible. “We have about 25 years before hybrids will be a big problem [in Khustain Nuruu],” predicts Boyd.

Even if the Khustain Nuruu programme achieves its goal of establishing a free-ranging, self-sustaining population of takhi, more reintroduction sites will be required to secure the species’ future in the wild. And as vast as Mongolia is, finding space for reserves is difficult, because where there is water and forage, there are also people and livestock.

After more than 200 years of first Chinese, and then Soviet rule, the newly independent Mongolia is still finding itself. The country is making the transition from a state-controlled economy to a privatised free-market system, but has not yet recovered from the loss of Soviet aid. (Until 1990, the Soviets sold Mongolia nearly all of its imports and bought most of its products.) Food is scarce, in part because only one percent of the land is arable, and the growing season is very short.

”The people and the government really support takhi reintroudction effortsk” says Jachingiin Tserendeleg, who coordinates the Mongolian Takhi Reintroduction Project and is president of the Mongolian Association for Conservation of Nature and the Environment. “But they are not able to contribute to this activity.”

Until Mongolia is ready for more takhi reintroduction programmes, the best conservation organisations can do is to continue keeping the zoo populations healthy. “The good news is that we’re not risking the gene pool,” says the San Diego Zoo’s Ryder, who formerly coordinated the North American zoo breeding programme. “We can preserve the species until it is securely re-established in the wild.”