Wild horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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]
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.
I guess we don't need to rewrite the stones song though.
Wood pigeons are wild and distinctly different from town pigeons.
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.
30 hours on their feet on a flight seems almost unbelievable, I can understand why #8 wanted to take a seat at the beginning.
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.
From the abstract at 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
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.
[1] https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/sout...
> A sample of 20–30 founders will normally contain well over 90% of the average genetic diversity in the source population
Those horse populations do well enough that the BLM regularly kills some off to limit the numbers. Ostensibly it's to protect the environment, but given the number of legal and illegal cattle that's allowed to graze on those same public lands I think the culling is mostly at the behest of ranchers.
https://stateline.org/2022/07/20/westerners-struggle-to-mana...
and while one can argue about the "true" motivations of the people arguing for culling/control, it's absolute true that conservation organizations think that feral horses are bad for the environment:
https://wildlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FactSheet-Ho...
All equids evolved in North America. For tens of millions of years they were here, and only have been gone for ~10,000 years until being reintroduced by the spanish. [1]
[1] See the fantastic book "Twilight of the Mammoths"
The same that they eat in Chornobyl. Everything that is green except traffic lights.
This animal are the equivalent to "Eurasian zebras" and was designed to roam around in arid places. They are really hard and able to fend for themselves, even under high predatory pressure and radioactivity levels.