Team Blitz India
AFTER about two centuries a group of the world’s last wild horses have returned to their native Kazakhstan. The seven horses, four mares from Berlin and a stallion and two other mares from Prague, were flown to the central Asian country on a Czech air force transport plane.
The wild horses, known as Przewalski’s horses, once roamed the vast steppe grasslands of central Asia, where horses are believed to have been first domesticated about 5,500 years ago.
Close to extinction
People are known to have been riding and milking horses in northern Kazakhstan nearly 2,000 years before the first records of domestication in Europe. Human activity, including hunting the animals for their meat, as well as road building, which fragmented their population, drove the horses close to extinction in the 1960s.
Filip Mašek, Prague zoo’s spokesperson, said: “These are the only remaining wild horses in the world. Mustangs are domesticated horses that went wild.” The horses reintroduced into Kazakhstan are descended from two groups that survived in Munich and Prague zoos.
Returned to zoo
Originally, eight horses had been scheduled to travel, said Mašek, but one horse sat down before the flight from Prague and had to be unloaded and returned to Prague zoo.
