The Ark on the Steppe

Wild Horses Healing the Earth — Ukraine

Every wild horse running free in China today, every takhi grazing the Mongolian steppe, every foal born on open ground anywhere on Earth, traces back through a needle's eye that was very nearly closed for good. And the place that held the thread when it almost snapped was not in Asia at all. It was a stretch of dry grassland in southern Ukraine.

Askania-Nova was founded in 1898 by Baron Friedrich Falz-Fein, on the flat Taurida steppe of what is now Kherson Oblast. It is old as these things go — one of the oldest nature reserves in the world — more than thirty-three thousand hectares of largely untouched steppe, later named a UNESCO biosphere reserve, holding hundreds of plant species and thousands of kinds of animal. Around 1899, Falz-Fein brought Przewalski's horses from the Mongolian steppe to his own — wild foals carried halfway across a continent to a grassland that, by some grace, looked a great deal like the one they had left. The horse was being collected even as it was vanishing. Around the turn of the century a German dealer, Carl Hagenbeck, captured most of the world's Przewalski's horses for the zoos of Europe. The wild was being emptied into cages — and the cages, it would turn out, were the only reason anything survived.

Because the wild kept failing. Hunting, harsh winters, livestock crowding the watering grounds, foals taken for collections — the free herds thinned through the early twentieth century and did not recover. And then the worst of it came not to the steppe of Asia but to the ark in Ukraine.

During the Second World War, German soldiers slaughtered the breeding herd at Askania-Nova — the single most genetically valuable collection of the species anywhere. The ark was gutted. By 1945 there were only about thirty-one Przewalski's horses left alive on the entire planet, nearly all of them in two zoos — Prague and Munich. The American group had died out completely. Thirty-one. From every horse that had ever run that vast Eurasian range, thirty-one.

And the needle narrowed further still. Every Przewalski's horse alive today descends from just nine of those survivors. Nine animals. A whole kind of creature — the last wild horse on Earth — funneled down to nine breeding individuals, every one of them held by human hands, none of them free. A single wild-caught mare, taken as a foal a decade earlier, was folded into the breeding population in 1957 — and she was the last. The last wild-born Przewalski's horse ever to join the line. The free herds in the homeland guttered out through the 1960s; the final wild individual, a lone stallion, was seen crossing the Mongolian desert in 1969. After that, nothing. The wild door closed, and everything that remained of the species was what people had managed to keep.

What happened next is the quiet, unglamorous heroism of record-keeping and patience. Prague Zoo held the longest unbroken breeding line in the world and kept the international studbook — the ledger of who descended from whom — so that the tiny, inbred population could be bred apart rather than collapsing into itself. In 1977, Jan and Inge Bouman founded the Foundation for the Preservation and Protection of the Przewalski Horse in Rotterdam, and began trading animals between zoos worldwide specifically to widen the narrow gene pool. It worked, slowly, the way real things do. From those few survivors the species climbed back past fifteen hundred animals by the early 1990s — enough, at last, to begin sending some home.

And Ukraine did not just hold the line during the worst of it. It rebuilt. Askania-Nova became the world's largest captive-breeding program for the species — the herd raised a second time from the ruins of the one the war destroyed, and a source of animals sent out to seed reintroductions elsewhere. The ark that was emptied filled again.

Then comes the strangest grace in the whole story.

In 1998, the first Przewalski's horses were released into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — thirty-one of them, ten stallions and eighteen mares from Askania-Nova, plus three more from a local zoo. The most poisoned ground on the continent: a forty-seven-hundred-square-kilometre dead zone from which three hundred and fifty thousand people had been evacuated after the 1986 reactor disaster. Land too dangerous for us became, by our absence, a refuge for them. Within twenty years the herd had multiplied roughly fivefold, reaching about a hundred and fifty by the 2018 count — thirteen family herds, six stallion groups, more than twenty foals born in a single year, some wandering north across the border into Belarus. Steppe animals by nature, they took even to the forest there — including the red forest, one of the most radioactive places on Earth. Wild horses, descended from nine survivors of a slaughter, thriving on ground we had to flee. If you wanted a single image for what these animals can do when we simply step back and let them, it is hard to do better than horses growing a wild population in the ruins of Chernobyl.

But the steppe gives no permanent endings, and the war that nearly erased this species the first time has a terrible rhyme. In March 2022, Russian forces occupied Askania-Nova, and the reserve's protected steppe was reclassified as hunting grounds, with reports of soldiers hunting animals there. The ark is under occupation again. The same ground that kept the last wild horse alive through one war is, as of this writing, in the grip of another — its fate, and the fate of the herd it still holds, uncertain.

So when you watch a Przewalski's horse standing on open ground today — in the Gobi, on the Mongolian steppe, in a Chinese desert reserve, anywhere — it is worth remembering what stands behind it. Not an unbroken line of wild freedom. A near-erasure, twice over. A handful of survivors in two zoos. Nine founders. A studbook kept by hand. A baron's steppe reserve in Ukraine that became, against everything, the place the thread held.

The horse healing the land elsewhere is only here to do it because somewhere, someone refused to let the last nine go.

References

• Askania-Nova history, area, biosphere status, and 2022 occupation: Askania-Nova reserve records; European Wilderness Society, Przewalski's Horses and the Battle for the Steppe, 2025.
• Falz-Fein bringing horses from Mongolia (c. 1899) and the reserve's founding (1898): Askania-Nova historical sources.
• Hagenbeck captures (c. 1900); WWII slaughter of the Askania-Nova herd; ~31 survivors in 1945 at Prague and Munich; descent of the modern population from ~9 founders: Scientific American, "10 Things You Didn't Know About Przewalski's Horses"; species conservation history.
• Last wild-caught mare (1957) and last wild sighting (1969): species population history.
• Bouman Foundation (1977, Rotterdam) and studbook (Prague Zoo): conservation history of the species.
• Recovery past ~1,500 by the early 1990s; IUCN reclassification (Critically Endangered 2008; Endangered 2011): IUCN / species status records.
• Chernobyl reintroduction (1998; 31 horses from Askania-Nova plus 3 from a local zoo), growth to ~150 by 2018, use of the Exclusion Zone including the Red Forest, spread into Belarus; zone area and evacuation figures: G. Orizaola, The mystery of Chernobyl's wild horses, The Conversation, 2020 (updated).