The Horse

by Wendy Williams

  Then, finally, on June 5, 1992, the first Takhi horses returned from Europe to their native land.

  “You should come to Mongolia next month,” Inge told me at our lunch, after telling me this story. “It’s twenty years now since the horses came home. We’re having a celebration.”

  And so I did.

  * * *

  If the Takhi horse belongs to any one region, it’s the world of inner Asia, where the land is still not fenced and where the rolling hills look like the rolling ocean and where in most of the country nothing can be seen but grasslands and bush and where walking is so discouraging that you think you’ll never get to the next rise, but you know you could gallop on forever if only you had a horse; and where dawn horses and Hipparion mares and eventually Equus himself once roamed with abandon, grazing on the green grasses and fields of flowers brought to humans and horses compliments of the 100-million-year-old Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution.

  This is Horse Country, writ bold.

  All you have to do is look at the Takhi to know that he belongs here. But you’ll also recognize that he’s different from the horses we’re used to seeing. He lacks the elegance of the Vogelherd horse. A dark stripe running down his dun-colored back bespeaks his heritage. His front nipping teeth are quite large, much larger than in other horses, and his shockingly huge jaw is more than beefy enough to house his massive molars.

  He is also unridable. By nature, he is intransigent. The stallions are sometimes extremely aggressive. The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute has a Takhi breeding program based in Front Royal, Virginia, where veterinarians are learning how to artificially inseminate the horses, an effort which will help in increasing the global population. While visiting the Smithsonian’s Front Royal facility, I stopped by the town’s visitor center, where I chatted with a volunteer who told me that he had once been standing casually by a fence enclosing a Takhi stallion. “Nice horsey,” he was thinking to himself, when, in an instant, the stallion rushed him with teeth bared, prepared to take a chunk of human flesh. The volunteer was impressed, but not overly enamored.

  A Takhi stallion in Mongolia’s Hustai National Park (Greg Auger)

  The Takhi is not easy to get along with, true, but the Mongolians don’t mind. A national symbol, he represents the Mongolians’ spirit of independence. Mongolians believe it’s a wonderful thing to have a foal from a domestic mare sired by a Takhi stallion, because his genes provide toughness and stamina. The Takhi is a genetic anomaly. Riding horses, including Mongolian riding horses, have sixty-four chromosomes, but the Takhi has sixty-six chromosomes. Nevertheless, a Takhi and a domestic horse breed easily and can produce a fertile foal. This foal has sixty-five chromosomes, but if the foal breeds again with a domestic horse, the offspring will be a horse with the standard sixty-four chromosomes.

  Some researchers once suggested that Takhi horses were the ancestors of modern horses, but recent genetic research has found that the Takhi separated from the main trunk of horse evolution about 160,000 years ago, only shortly after Homo sapiens evolved on the African plains. So the Takhi is a side branch in horse evolution, perhaps a modern version of Megahippus, the evolutionary dead end that Matthew Mihlbachler discussed at the American Museum of Natural History. They are not the root from which modern horses grew, but they are close kin.

  That the Takhi is an emblem of modern Mongolia became obvious to me the moment I stepped off the plane in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolians adore this animal with a fervency I had not expected. I spoke with a number of people about them, and everyone was thrilled to have them back. Of course, Mongolia is all about horses anyway. The emblem of the Mongolian state airlines on which I flew is a blue horse’s head encircled in yellow, the blue signifying that Mongolia is the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky and the yellow signifying that the sun always shines over this landlocked nation. Fixated as Mongolians are on horses to begin with, they have a special place in their hearts for this audacious, untamable, prodigal horse that was lost to them and has now come home.

  Each time I said “Takhi” people melted into paroxysms of enthusiasm. They often mentioned that the return of the horses occurred at about the same time as their nation gained independence from the Soviet Union, doubling their love for the horse. As the Liberty Bell is to the American spirit of independence, the Takhi is to the Mongolian spirit of freedom.

  * * *

  Ulaanbaatar, two decades ago a small country town where horses and red deer were more common than cars, is now a major international city. Tracking down the location for the celebration was not an easy task, but my taxi driver persevered. It turned out I had been given an incorrect address: the location was a back alley. Next he took me to a concession center for Western hunters looking to bag Mongolian big game. The hunting guides very quickly figured out that I didn’t belong there.

  They sent us over to a Buddhist monastery, where the golden-robed monks had no idea what we were talking about but smiled benevolently anyway. I waited for the driver to throw up his hands in despair, but he wasn’t giving up. Not for nothing have these purposeful people survived millennia of being relentlessly squeezed by China to the south and Russia to the north, and not for nothing did Genghis Khan establish an empire ruled from horseback that extended from Korea to the gates of Vienna.

  Finally, we pulled up to a small nature center. Photos of Takhi covered the walls inside. My driver looked triumphant. The place was filled to overflowing with Mongolian people and a few Westerners, including Inge and her colleague Piet Wit, a prime point man for the Takhi effort and an urbane wildlife expert with a lot of experience. Aside from helping to organize Hustai’s Takhi reintroduction program, Wit has worked extensively with African programs that train local people in protecting wildlife, managing water resources, and implementing responsible forestry practices. In the politically complex West African nation of Guinea-Bissau he established, in honor of his son who died tragically at a young age, an important research and protection program, called Chimbo, to protect the highly endangered West African chimpanzee. He is also chair of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. Rewilding requires considerable on-the-ground experience, and Wit, who has committed his entire life to this effort, is one of the world’s best.

  By the time I walked into that celebration, the Takhi had been in the country for two decades, but it was clear from the vodka-filled three days, after listening to speech after speech praising the return of “our dear horse,” that no one was yet taking them for granted. The horses held the status of a living treasure, like the Lipizzans of Austria. Although I tried, I learned very little of the Mongolian language during those three riotous days, but I did often hear, about every ten minutes, someone saying proudly, “Mongol Takh, Mongol Takh.” It’s a phrase I will never forget.

  * * *

  During this time, I met many people who participated in the effort to preserve the prodigal ponies. After the first horses were returned to Hustai, many more Mongolian officials and scientists joined the effort. Jachin Tserendeleg oversaw the breeding of the horses. He died at about the same time Jan Bouman died, but his son is still involved. And I met Bandi Namkhai, the director of Hustai since the project’s earliest days. The Hustai project began as a way to provide a protected area for the horses, but it has since grown enormously. Hustai itself is now designated a national park, and today it protects not just Takhi horses, but threatened bird species, gazelles, red deer, marmots, wolves, badgers, large and small cat species, and numerous plants.

  Even Argali sheep have moved into the park, which provides a refuge from hunting pressure, something of which Wit and his Mongolian colleagues are particularly proud. Today, the park, started for the horses, has become an important wildlife haven, as often happens in rewilding projects. In Mongolia and throughout central Asia, following the collapse of communism, economic chaos ruled. Governments were unstable, and people had no experience with trade or markets, which had been outlawed for decades. The chaos and lack of dependabl
e trading systems caused starvation and extreme poverty. Under those circumstances, the desperate people decimated wildlife populations.

  Wit and Bandi Namkhai assumed the unenviable job of convincing local villagers to respect the park’s boundaries when hunting. It wasn’t easy. It was one thing to convince people to support the presence of the Takhi and quite another thing to convince them not to hunt the other animals and not to sneak their herds of goats and sheep and domestic horses onto the park’s rich grasslands when their own grazing areas were depleted. First Jan and Inge, and then Bandhi and Wit, worked hard to convince local people that their willingness to comply would result in the long run in a healthy tourism industry that would support the area’s villagers.

  Today the park has become an economic mainstay for people who live in the area. Thousands of people come from all around the world each year to see the horses, to sleep in simple, well-maintained ger—small round portable houses with beds and stoves for wintertime use—and to tour the park, either on foot, in guided vehicles, or on horseback. Additionally, the park’s foundation has initiated a microcredit program that allows individual villagers to borrow small amounts of money in order to start up small business endeavors. Wit explained that the loan program had worked quite well.*

  * * *

  All this was explained to me at the celebration in the city, at which I also met officials with the International Takhi-Group, a Swiss-based organization. The ITG operates a second rewilding effort in the Gobi Desert, on the border with China.

  This international effort has borne fruit. By the time of the celebration, almost two thousand Takhi lived in a mix of zoos, pastures, and wild places worldwide. When Inge and Jan began their crusade to save the horses, wildlife researchers had very little experience with how best to return captive animals to the wild, but by the time of the Mongolian celebration, it had become widely accepted that zoo animals cannot be sent directly to wilderness areas without some support in the initial stages.

  As Ransom and I had discussed, wild animals require extensive knowledge of their environment. Some natural horse behavior may be inborn, but the knowledge of how to survive in a region can only come from direct experience. Having done nothing but stand in small, dusty paddocks, zoo-bound animals don’t even know that they need to know things. They don’t know that they have to search for food and water, since it’s always been brought to them. They don’t know what kind of social structure they should adopt, or how to depend on each other, or even which species are dangerous predators and which they can ignore. They’ve been so isolated that they have no idea how to survive.

  Since the Takhi did not know how to form such groups, Jan and Inge wondered if they would ever be able to survive on their own. First, the couple purchased a few surplus horses from zoos and released them into a small pasture not far from Amsterdam. Caretakers watched over them while the horses learned how to be horses. First, mare bands began to coalesce. These mare bands began to learn where to find food and water, and eventually well-worn paths appeared in the pasturelands as the horses walked from grazing to water to grazing and back to water again. In these semi-reserves, the horses began to expand their repertoire of behavior. With each passing month, they began to look more and more like other free-roaming horse populations.

  Scientists saw unexpected results. Some of the effects of domestication began to disappear. For example, Takhi reproduction rates improved dramatically under these more natural circumstances. In the reserves, reproductive rates nearly tripled, increasing to about 92 percent from the 35 percent of horses kept in zoos. One reason why this happened may be that the mares’ breeding dates and delivery dates became more attuned to the rhythms of nature. In domestication, mares are often bred to deliver in January or February. Zoo managers had timed the Takhi schedules this way. When mares from the zoos were first released on the reserves, this situation continued—but only for the first year. By the second year, the mares began to mate at the right time, during early summer, when the sun was high in the sky. They then delivered almost a year later, in late spring. Foal survival rates improved. The warmer weather and better forage improved their health and the health of their dams.

  The strategy of releasing Takhi horses into semi-protected areas was so successful that it is now accepted practice. Today Takhi live on reserves, where they are closely watched, in a surprising number of places—in Holland, France, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe; in Ohio, in China, and even in Chernobyl, where many species of animals have been released onto land that’s had to be vacated by humans after the nuclear disaster there. Some of these horses in reserves may be sent on to wildlife refuges like Hustai, but others will likely spend their whole lives on the reserves. There are still few places in the world where the horses live truly wild lives, but their populations in the managed reserves are quite healthy.

  This success alone was reward to Inge and Jan for their lives well lived. During the festivities, Inge and others held a press conference to talk to Mongolian reporters about the project’s success.

  “It’s a dream come true,” Inge told them. “My husband would never have dreamed there would be so many horses.”

  Then she cried.

  * * *

  The day after the press conference, the local English-language newspaper, the UB Post, carried a huge headline splashed across the front page above the fold: “Mongolia Has the Largest Population of Wild Horses in the World.” A photo of six mares and a foal grazing in Hustai, set against a backdrop of the eternal blue sky, spread across all six columns.

  “An important reason why this project has succeeded,” Piet Wit once told me, “is because of the tremendous enthusiasm of the Mongolian people.”

  When I drove out to Hustai, where the celebration continued, I saw what he meant. Local villagers had gathered for their own festivities. The area of the park where the tourists stayed was filled with villagers and visitors dancing and singing and eating. A lot of vodka was passed around. On a nearby hillside, Mongolian men took part in wrestling activities.

  While the wrestling went on, a horse race began. Mongolian horse racing isn’t like horse racing in western cultures. For one thing, some races last for hours. The hardy little horses are ridden by the smallest children in a family, boys or girls, because they weigh the least. As soon as the kids are old enough to ride by themselves over long distances, they are allowed to race their family’s horses.

  As I watched, parents threw their kids up onto the horses’ backs. Readying themselves for the competition, the children began to ride in circles and sing traditional songs to encourage the horse to run a brave, gallant race. Eventually, the kids and horses gathered at the edge of a long, open, flat grassland. This was where the race started. Adults on motorcycles pulled up. These adults, it turned out, were going to ride along with the kids, to be sure no one got hurt.

  And—the race was off. The kids disappeared in a cloud of dust. After a few minutes they were no longer visible, and everyone returned to the wrestling match, which was still going. Food appeared. People basked in the sun. The wrestling continued. The kids still hadn’t returned. More wrestling happened. People talked among themselves. The kids still hadn’t returned.

  After nearly an hour, a few sweaty horses and riders appeared from over the horizon. Then more and more horses appeared, accompanied by adults on motorcycles. It seemed that everything had proceeded safely and that no kids had fallen or been injured. The horses were all still galloping.

  As the front-runners neared the finish line (where, exactly, that was, I still hadn’t figured out), riders used their whips with great enthusiasm. Mongolian horse races are free-for-all experiences, and I saw several of the riders use their quirts not on their horses, but on other riders. No one seemed upset by this.

  One by one, the other horses came in. There was no great cheer for the horse who came in first, although there was polite clapping. These races are about winning, but they’re also about other issues of equal im
portance—like the gathering of far-flung families, and the sharing of information about the year’s grazing opportunities, and the worth of the individual horses owned by each family.

  * * *

  Horses have been central to Mongolia since recorded history began, particularly during the early thirteenth-century days of Genghis Khan. Mounted warriors ranged from Korea all the way to Vienna. This empire held together and lasted for several more centuries because Mongolian riders carried messages all over the empire, in much the same way that Pony Express riders in the nineteenth century carried messages from Missouri across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to California. And just as the Pony Express riders changed horses at outposts spaced along their ride, Mongolian messengers during the era of Genghis Khan changed horses at regular outposts maintained by the empire’s government.

  The domestic horse is just as important to Mongolians today as it was then. It is the center that unites the nation. Mongolian herders keep a variety of livestock, including camels, yaks, goats, and sheep. But the horse is the most important. Mongolia is known as “the Land of No Fences,” and the domestic horses graze freely. Cattle and other livestock are herded, but the horses are left to their own devices, although people do periodically check up on them. Nevertheless, as in Galicia, each horse is owned by a particular family. When someone wants to ride, he brings one of his horses in from the herd, halters him, and ties him to a line near the ger. He may ride this horse from time to time over several days, leaving him on this tether when the horse is not being used. During this time, of course, the horse is fed and watered. After a few days, when the rider thinks the horse needs to rest, he returns the horse to the family herd and gets another.