[HN Gopher] Wild horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan steppes after...
___________________________________________________________________
Wild horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two
centuries
Author : racional
Score : 97 points
Date : 2024-06-10 22:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| exabrial wrote:
| wild 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 wrote:
| notably 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Pigeons 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
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Some 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
| delecti wrote:
| Multiple 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| _wild 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 wrote:
| Would that some zebras do that and interbred with these
| horses
| MostlyStable wrote:
| From 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]
| wantsanagent wrote:
| I empathize with the one horse that sat down. "Nope. 30 hours on
| a plane standing? Hell no. Put me back in the zoo."
| krunck wrote:
| I don't know. I find that sitting is just as bad. I wish planes
| had treadmill seats....
| interludead wrote:
| I wonder what that would look like on planes.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Is there enough genetic diversity in this group of 7 horses to
| repopulate the area? This seems like a very tight gene
| bottleneck.
| ajb wrote:
| The article says they will move 40 in total
| smallnix wrote:
| From "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
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| What do the wild horses actually eat? The steppes is a pretty
| barren place right?
| rurp wrote:
| For a similar comparison, wild horses do surprisingly well in
| some desert regions of the Southwest US. It's a surprising
| treat to see a healthy herd of horses meandering through Joshua
| Trees. They can apparently do pretty well on sparse grasses and
| shrubs.
|
| 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.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| "Do surprisingly well" depends on your expectations I guess.
| Yes, it can be a treat to see a healthy herd. It's much less
| a treat to see emaciated, dehydrated horses, which are not
| that uncommon:
|
| 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...
| sriacha wrote:
| Wild horses in North America are a very interesting
| question.
|
| 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"
| verisimi wrote:
| I thought BLM was more of an urban thing..
| dantillberg wrote:
| Bureau of Land Management :)
| Marsymars wrote:
| There are also the feral horses on Sable Island, which is
| basically just a sand dune with some grass:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sable_Island_horse
| pvaldes wrote:
| > What do the wild horses actually eat?
|
| 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.
| interludead wrote:
| I think grasses make up the majority of a wild horse's diet
| fuzztester wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Curious, 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
|
| > _we present... independent lines of evidence demonstrating
| domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan,
| dating to about 3500 BCE_
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| More 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
| vondur wrote:
| Great, soon the horsemen will wreak havoc on the sedentary city
| based civilizations!
| explorigin wrote:
| That'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.
| erikig wrote:
| Originally, eight horses had been scheduled to travel, said
| Masek, 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 wrote:
| For 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-12 23:01 UTC)