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The Yellow Horses

In 1878, an explorer named Colonel Nikolai Mikhailovich Przewalski made a discovery. On the plains of Mongolia, he found wild horses, unlike any he'd ever seen before. They were all a creamy colour, and had no forelock. Their manes were erect and bristly, more like those of a zebra or a donkey than a horse.

What Przewalski had found were the remnants of the last true wild horses in the world. Other so-called wild' horses are really domestic horses which have gone feral.

It's not yet been established whether the domestic horse (Equus caballos) developed from Przewalski's Horse (Equus przewalskii) or if it developed separately from a common ancestor. They are, however, closely enough related to interbreed, and to produce fertile offspring.

Possibly E. caballos prevailed, because its more docile nature made it easier to domesticate. Its less tractable cousin might probably have been hunted for food. By the time Przewalski made his discovery, E. przewalskii ranged only on the steppes of Mongolia.

Because of loss of habitat, and interbreeding with domestic horses, the numbers of Przewalski's Horse were rapidly diminishing. There were several hybrids on the plains, but fewer and fewer purebred Przewalskis. These may well have been hunted down by the Mongolian herdsmen, to keep them from the grazing they wanted for their own horses. The last confirmed sighting of a true Przwalski's Horse in the wild was near the Takhin Tal (Yellow Horse Mountain) in Mongolia, in 1969.

Fortunately, in the intervening years, some Przewalski's Horses had been taken into captivity, and bred in zoos in America and Europe. By 1993, there were about 1200 animals in zoos around the world.

But, keeping an animal in a zoo isn't preservation. It quickly loses the skills it needs to survive in the wild. It will forget how and where to find its food, which food is harmful, how to select the right mate and how to avoid predators. Its keepers take care of all these things. Those skills will be completely absent in any offspring, and will have to be re-learnt.

You just can't release a captive animal into the wild, and expect it to survive.

An additional factor is that the reason for extinction in the wild will have to be identified and eliminated. It's possible, though, to release captive animals into semi-wild conditions, so they can be monitored and their behaviour studied. If the animal has problems learning to fend for itself, it can receive assistance ... and its descendants could well

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