Early in June, the Prague Zoo organized an airlift of seven Przewalski’s Horses from Europe to the nation in Central Asia.
After just two weeks, the horses are already thriving, according to researchers who spoke with the news. They are already starting the mating process and exploring the plains.
According to zoo officials, it’s the fruit of decades of conservation efforts.
“This is an endangered species returning to their ancestral lands, a species which went extinct in the wild in the 1960s, last seen in Mongolia… so it’s just marvelous—a miracle,” said Filip Mašek, a spokesman at Prague Zoo.
Although in recent decades the horses have been gradually returned to China and Mongolia, this operation is the first time they have been back in Kazakhstan.
Named for Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski, who was the first to identify the horse for the European scientific world, the Przewalski’s Horse is the last remaining wild horse species on Earth.
The species came from the Central Asian steppes millennia ago, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers brought it to Europe and North America, where populations were formed in zoos.
Reintroduced in Kazakhstan are their ancestors, some of whom ended up in zoos in Munich and Prague.
