The return of Mongolia's "wild" horses - Nigel Rothfels

206,391 views ・ 2023-04-25

TED-Ed


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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For thousands of years, native Takhi horses roamed the steppes of Central Asia.
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But by the late 1960s, they’d become extinct in the wild—
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the last herds struggling in meager habitats
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against hunters and competition from local livestock.
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Some small groups of Takhi survived in European zoos,
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but their extinction still seemed inevitable.
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To prevent this terrible fate,
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a coalition of scientists and zoos pulled together
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to start an international Takhi breeding program.
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By the 1990s, these collaborators in Europe and the US
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began releasing new generations of Asia’s ancient wild horse
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back into their native habitat.
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This Takhi revival was a world-famous conservation victory,
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but the full story is much more complicated than it first appears.
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And its twists and turns raise serious questions about the role of zoos
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and what conservation even means.
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To get the whole story, we need to start in the late 1800s
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when Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky was gifted
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the remains of one of these wild horses.
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Though the Takhi had long been known to local Mongolians,
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European scientists were intrigued by the remains,
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which looked more like those of a donkey or zebra than any known domestic horse.
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They concluded the species was a sort of missing link
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between wild asses and modern horses.
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And as reports of the newly dubbed Przhevalsky’s horse
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circulated through Europe and America,
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zoo proprietors became eager to acquire the previously unknown species.
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At this time, zoos were focused primarily on drawing visitors with exotic animals,
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and their exhibitions were more concerned with entertainment than animal welfare.
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But in the early 1900s, the near extinction of the American bison
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and the total extinction of other species like the passenger pigeon
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inspired zoos to rebrand as centers for conservation.
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And as it became clear that Przhevalsky’s horse might be headed for a similar fate,
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zoos began breeding programs to sustain the captive population.
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However, the individuals behind these programs came to an interesting conclusion
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about how the horses should be bred.
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Like their colleagues, they believed the species represented a missing link
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between modern domestic horses and their more primitive ancestors.
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They also knew that some of the horses in their collections weren’t purebred Takhi,
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and many didn’t even resemble the species’ standard description.
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So breeders felt it was up to them to determine what a wild Takhi
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should look like,
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and breed them accordingly.
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Basing their work on just a few specimens and broad beliefs
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about what a primitive horse might look like,
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they created a rigorous model for the ideal Takhi.
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And over the 20th century,
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breeders in western zoos and private collections
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created a population of thousands of horses
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all carefully bred to share the same physical characteristics.
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Of course, in their native habitat,
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wild Takhi had regularly interbred with domesticated horses for millennia,
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producing a population with much more diverse appearances.
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So when it was time to introduce the Takhi to their ancestral home,
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they were quite different from the horses
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who’d been taken from those steppes a century earlier.
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Complicating things even further,
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while these new Takhi herds were no longer in zoos,
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to this day, almost all remain closely monitored
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and controlled for their own protection.
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So in a strange way, it’s hard to say if these animals are actually in the wild
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or even if they’re truly Takhi.
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The story of the Takhi horse is not unique.
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In many of our conservation victories,
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it’s difficult to say exactly what was saved,
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and the role that zoos play in conservation can be very complicated.
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It's clear that zoos have been and can continue to be significant forces
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for animal preservation,
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especially efforts to save charismatic animals from extinction.
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But today, the most direct cause of animal extinctions
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are humanity’s impacts on animal habitats and Earth’s climate.
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So if zoos truly want to help protect the diversity of animal life on this planet,
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perhaps they should redirect their efforts
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to preserving the natural habitats these animals so desperately need.
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