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Wild horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries
- exabrial 2y agowild and feral are used interchangeably in today's vernacular, but it appears these truly are wild (as in undomesticated, the opposite of your dog). How cool!
- riffic 2y agonotably pigeons are feral and I absolutely was thinking the same thing here going off the headline. I guess we don't need to rewrite the stones song though.
- vsnf 2y agoIn my understanding feral is a domesticated creature that has found it self adapting back to the wild, while a wild creature was never domesticated at all. How can pigeons be feral?
- tomrod 2y agoPigeons are domesticated doves. Humans have used them for meat and, if memory serves, communication for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_pigeon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_pigeon
- jimnotgym 2y agoSome pigeons are domesticated doves, the kind of pigeons you see in town. Wood pigeons are wild and distinctly different from town pigeons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wood_pigeon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wood_pigeon
- RoyalHenOil 2y agoThere are over 300 pigeon/dove species, and nearly all of these are wild and have never been domesticated. However, when people say "pigeon" without specifying a particular species, they are almost always referring to feral rock doves (Columba livia domestica) commonly found in urban environments all over the world.
- delecti 2y agoMultiple types of Pigeons(/doves) have been domesticated through history. The pigeons most people are familiar with in big cities are feral domesticated rock doves.
- saghm 2y agoI think I might disagree, I would absolutely love there to be a rerecording where Mick Jagger croons that feral pigeons couldn't drag him away
- pvg 2y agowild and feral are used interchangeably Both of these terms are much easier to say than "Przewalski" which probably attracted the headline writer. And a reader is less likely to confuse these wild horses with escapees from an oligarch's zoo or somesuch.
- Apocryphon 2y agoWould that some zebras do that and interbred with these horses
- MostlyStable 2y agoFrom my understanding, exactly how "wild" these horses are is mildly controversial, with some claiming that they have a non-trivial amount of domesticated horse ancestry. From Wikipedia: >Przewalski's horse was formally described as a novel species in 1881 by Ivan Semyonovich Polyakov. The taxonomic position of Przewalski's horse remains controversial, and no consensus exists about whether it is a full species (as Equus przewalskii); a subspecies of Equus ferus the wild horse (as Equus ferus przewalskii in trinomial nomenclature, along with two other subspecies, the domestic horse E. f. caballus, and the extinct tarpan E. f. ferus); or even a subpopulation of the domestic horse.[6][7][8] The American Society of Mammalogists considers the Przewalski's horse and the tarpan both to be subspecies of Equus ferus, and classifies the domestic horse as a separate species, Equus caballus.[9]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wantsanagent 2y agoI empathize with the one horse that sat down. "Nope. 30 hours on a plane standing? Hell no. Put me back in the zoo."
- krunck 2y agoI don't know. I find that sitting is just as bad. I wish planes had treadmill seats....
- interludead 2y agoI wonder what that would look like on planes.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWhat do the wild horses actually eat? The steppes is a pretty barren place right?
- Apocryphon 2y ago[flagged]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoYes, and little else. A lot of it is land with short grasses as well although that varies by region. I guess I am surprised it would be enough for horses nutritionally.
- orwin 2y agoIt was enough for mongol/kereit/naiman/turcik horses (eastern steppe horses?). Of the 5 snouts, only the horse could rely on grass only without peas or roots, which made it the king of the 5, everybody knew how to take care of a horse, even semi-nomad clans had 2 to 3 per adult.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoDidn’t those people all domesticate horses? I would think they may have farmed grains to feed the horses. And these introduced horses are meant to be wild.
- Ar-Curunir 2y agoAlmost all steppe peoples domesticated existing wild horses
- Apocryphon 2y agoWell, the horses are indigenous to that habitat, after all.
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- doctoboggan 2y agoIs there enough genetic diversity in this group of 7 horses to repopulate the area? This seems like a very tight gene bottleneck.
- ajb 2y agoThe article says they will move 40 in total
- smallnix 2y agoFrom "PROBLEMS OF PRZEWALSKI HORSE REINTRODUCTION INTO THE WILD": > A sample of 20–30 founders will normally contain well over 90% of the average genetic diversity in the source population https://www.fao.org/4/AC148E/AC148E03.htm https://www.fao.org/4/AC148E/AC148E03.htm
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoYou should not assume that this group of 7 is the end of the project.
- fuzztester 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumby https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumby I used to read about brumbies in Australian adventure novels that were written some decades or a century or two ago. Good reading fun for a kid.
- mdp2021 2y agoCurious, since horses seem to come from Kazakhstan (the first evidence of domestication is from there and from Ukraine). From the abstract at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1168594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1168594 > we present... independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 BCE
- Ichthypresbyter 2y agoMore recent research [0] suggests that the Botai horses are Przewalski horses that were hunted, not domesticated. The apparent bit damage is explainable by natural wear. Also, the age/sex distribution of the horse remains don't fit with what you would expect from a domestic herd, none of them showed signs of having been ridden, some had been shot with arrows, and the evidence of horses having been kept in pens and horse milk stored for consumption was weaker than first thought. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86832-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86832-9
- mldbk 2y agoAs well as apples [1]. Almaty used to have the most delicious aports back then [1] https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/southern-heritage-apple-orchard/apple-history/origins-apples https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/sout...
- vondur 2y agoGreat, soon the horsemen will wreak havoc on the sedentary city based civilizations!
- explorigin 2y agoThat's weird. I was there 20ish years ago and ran into a group of (what seemed to my untrained eye) wild horses when I was hiking in the Tien-shan mountains.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- erikig 2y agoOriginally, 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... These horses have to stand for the entire journey – they can’t sit down. 30 hours on their feet on a flight seems almost unbelievable, I can understand why #8 wanted to take a seat at the beginning.
- seabass-labrax 2y agoFor a horse, that's not so unpleasant in itself - their legs are able to 'lock' in place. Some horses will voluntarily choose to be on their feet for that amount of time anyway (not that I've watched any individual for long enough to personally vouch for this!) and are able to sleep standing up too. This is common to all equids, these Przewalski's horses included. Being stuck in a shipping container with no view for 30 hours though, that's another thing entirely... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay_apparatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay_apparatus
- stainablesteel 2y agohorses tend to sleep standing up, their legs are made for it
- RoyalHenOil 2y agoHorses mostly stand and occasionally lie down, but they do not naturally sit. If a horse sits (except very briefly in the transition between lying and standing), it can indicate that something is physically wrong with it.
- pedalpete 2y agoA horse can travel about 30 miles a day, and by the sounds of thing, this 30 hour trip was about 1600 miles. Does that mean they could ride/guide the horses back in about 2 months?
- darby_nine 2y agoPresumably these undomesticated (idk to what degree, I think they've interbred with domestic horses) horses are not generally interested in being ridden. Besides I'm guessing 30 hours of known issues might be more attractive and/or cheaper than 2 months of unknown issues.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoWhen I look at the horse in the main photo, the way one of its ears sticks out makes it look like a unicorn.