Top 10 Horses Of The 21st Century So Far With Their Incredibility

Hunted to extinction in the wild in the 1960s, today there are nearly 1,000 Przewalski’s horses at three sites in Mongolia, with more in China and Kazakhstan. The biggest population – numbering 423 – is in central Mongolia’s Hustai national park, the descendants of 84 animals airlifted from European zoos in the 1990s.

Each year they attract tens of thousands of visitors to this small patch of pristine mountain steppe just 100km from the capital, Ulaanbaatar.

“Before the reintroduction, nobody believed we could save this species,” says Dashpurev, who runs Hustai national park. Since then, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has downgraded the risk status of Przewalski’s horse twice: “Our biggest achievement,” he says.

The success stands in stark contrast to other parts of Mongolia. Over the past three decades, the country’s wildlife has been decimated by a combination of hunting, the climate crisis and overgrazing, with creeping desertification turning huge tracts of its vast grasslands into dust.

“Mongolia’s wildlife is in crisis,” says Tungaa Ulambayar, the local representative of the Zoological Society of London. “It is in real danger of being wiped out.”