Rare Wild Horses Headed for Mongolia

Wild Przewalski horses are set to return to the steppes of Mongolia after an absence of 25 years thanks to the hard work of a dedicated band of Dutch volunteers.

“This is a unique animal--the only surviving wild ancestor of the modern domestic horse,” said Jan Bouman, the driving force behind the ambitious project.

Bouman heads a small group of people, backed by hundreds of private donors, who are on the verge of realizing their dream of returning the Przewalski horse to the wild.

Sandy brown in color with a white nose, an erect mane and a dark stripe down its back, the Przewalski horse most closely resembles a coarse domestic pony.

In prehistoric times, the animals roamed the Eurasian steppes from Mongolia and China in the east to France in the west where they were hunted by our ancestors for food.

Later, as agriculture and animal husbandry swallowed up more and more of the steppes, the horses’ habitat gradually disappeared.

At the end of the 19th Century, when they were “discovered” on the Chinese-Mongolian border by Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky, the horses were already scarce.

By the late 1960s they had died out completely in the wild and survived only in zoos.

The turning point came in 1977 when Bouman and a few kindred spirits set up the Foundation for the Preservation and Protection of the Przewalski Horse.

Bouman, who has a longstanding interest in ancient breeds of horses, described his work for the Przewalski foundation as “a hobby which got a bit out of hand.”

The retired Rotterdam social worker said he and his fellow volunteers are driven by a sense of respect for horses, which have been so important as companions and servants to people.

“We owe so much to the horse. It has played such a big role in human civilization,” he said.

Official recognition and financial assistance from the Worldwide Fund for Nature enabled the foundation to buy 10 Przewalski horses from zoos.

Today, the foundation has 75 horses that run free at five special parks in the Netherlands and Germany.

All the horses have been carefully bred to ensure the greatest possible genetic variation and to make them strong enough to fend for themselves in the wild.

In collaboration with Prof. Vladimir Sokolov, a Soviet expert on Przewalski horses, a search was launched for a site where the horses could return to nature.

This search led to an agreement with the Mongolian government last year to set up a 100,000-acre reservation in unspoiled steppes 60 miles south of Ulan Bator.

Two Mongolian officials recently spent two weeks in the Netherlands to prepare for the arrival of the first group of eight young horses, which is scheduled for May.