Prague Zoo has successfully completed the transport of eight Przewalski’s horses to Kazakhstan, including four stallions brought in from Prague early last week and four mares arriving from the Berlin Zoo and released into acclimatisation enclosures in the Golden Steppe on Friday. The zoo announced the news over the weekend.
This year’s transport of eight Przewalski’s horses has set a record. “On Monday, we released four stallions into the Golden Steppe in Kazakhstan, and on Friday, four mares,” said Prague zoo spokeswoman Nikola Dostalkova. “In terms of the number of horses transported from Europe to Central Asia, this is the highest number in the 15-year history of the Return of the Wild Horses project.”
The horses will spend about a year at the local Alibi reintroduction center. Over an area of several dozen hectares, they will acclimate to steppe conditions – hot summers and freezing winters – learn to dig for food in the snow, and form social bonds. Only then will they be able to head out into the wild – the large enclosure will open, and it will be up to the horses when they leave it.
The four mares from the Berlin Zoo departed from the German capital on Friday afternoon CEST, making two stopovers in Istanbul and Baku. After 15 hours, the Czech military plane with the mares landed in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, from where the horses were transported in truck trailers to the Alibi Center over the next ten hours.
The suitable candidates for transport were selected by Prague Zoo, which has managed the International Stud Book for Przewalski’s Horses since 1959.
The zoo plans to continue the project to reintroduce the endangered species into the wild in Kazakhstan for the next two years. After that, it will focus on releasing wild horses into eastern Mongolia’s Valley of Monasteries.
The Przewalski’s horse, the last living wild horse, disappeared from the wild in the late 1960s, surviving only in the care of zoos. Thanks to international cooperation, efforts are succeeding in returning the animals to the Central Asian steppes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Over 260 foals have been born so far at Prague Zoo and its breeding and acclimatisation station in Dolni Dobrejov in Czech Siberia. The zoo’s herds of Przewalski’s horses can be seen in the zoo and also in a large enclosure on the Divci Hrady plain above the Vltava River in the southwestern part of Prague.
