Forty years after China brought 11 Przewalski’s horses home to Xinjiang, the world’s last truly wild horse roams the steppe again. Their story, and the people behind it, holds lessons for every country trying to undo extinction, including Pakistan.
Dust rises behind them before you see them clearly. A small band of stocky, dun-coloured horses with upright manes moves across the Kalamaili Nature Reserve in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, stopping to graze, testing the wind, then running again across the open Gobi.
These are Przewalski’s horses, the only horse species never domesticated and the last wild horses left on Earth. Two decades ago, a scene like this would have been impossible. By the 1970s, they had vanished from the wild in China altogether.
Their return has taken four decades of patient work. Today the herds are growing again, in breeding centres and on the open steppe. The question has changed. It is no longer whether these horses can be brought back, but whether they can stay.
Eleven horses and a long road home
The story began in 1985, when China brought 11 Przewalski’s horses from Germany and the United Kingdom to Xinjiang and set up the Xinjiang Wild Horse Breeding and Research Centre. Three years later, the first foal was born there. By 2000, about 100 more had followed.
Breeding, however, was only the first step. A horse that survives because people feed it is not yet a wild horse.
In 2001, the centre released 27 horses directly into the Kalamaili reserve in the Junggar Basin. There was no period of adjustment, and the landscape was unforgiving: harsh weather, scarce grass and water, and fierce rivalry between stallions. Three of the horses died.
A brother and his sisters
Zhang Yanbao spent seven years following the horses after that first release. One family still stays with him.
A mare had been released with her three young. When she died, her two daughters closed ranks around their younger brother, a colt later known as No. 147, and stepped in whenever fights broke out in the herd.
Normally, a dominant stallion drives young males away as soon as they become rivals. No. 147 stayed far longer than anyone expected.
“His sisters shielded him whenever he needed and kept him close,” Zhang says. When he was finally pushed out, he did something few young stallions manage so quickly: he gathered mares of his own and founded a new group. “That was a remarkable achievement,” Zhang says.
Learning to be wild
Those first hard lessons changed the method. Horses chosen for release now spend six months to a year in a transitional area of about 20 square kilometres inside the reserve. There they learn the land, find their own grass and water, and grow used to life with fewer people around.
The feeding schedule tells the story. At the breeding centre, the horses are fed twice a day. In the transitional area, food appears only once every three to five days.
“Horses have very keen senses,” says Xue Jiannan, an animal science engineer at the centre. “Even before leaving the enclosure, they can detect where grass and water are more abundant outside.”
Preparation is not a guarantee. In winter, deep snow can bury the grass; too little snow can leave water holes frozen hard. Rangers keep watch, bringing food or water in extreme weather and calling in vets when an injury or illness threatens a horse’s life.
Entemahan Azhanhan, a senior veterinarian at the centre, remembers one emergency in 2016. Two stallions had fought, and one was so badly bitten that the wound became infected and he could no longer walk. Entemahan operated under anaesthesia, cleaned the wound and stitched it, then spent ten days on injections, painkillers and dressings. The stallion lived, and could still sire foals.
The aim of such care, the team says, is not to protect the horses from every danger, but to give them the best possible chance to survive on their own. By January 2026, about 180 horses raised by people had been returned to the wild in Xinjiang.
Seven hours on foot
The people who watch over the horses have their own stories of survival.
In the early 2000s, the reserve had little monitoring equipment and patchy communications. Rangers worked in pairs across an immense landscape where wolves were never far away.
One summer afternoon, Zhang’s vehicle broke down deep in the reserve. He and his colleague could not fix it, and staying the night among predators was out of the question. So they started walking.
“We ran for seven hours straight, without resting or drinking water,” Zhang says. “I never imagined I could run for so long.” At about 11 p.m. they reached a herdsman’s home, where they were given food and water, before walking another hour or two to leave the reserve.
Today the work is different. The team uses camera traps, thermal cameras, drones and GPS collars. Lead mares wear collars linked to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, showing researchers where each herd spends its days. But technology has not replaced experience. Knowing where to look, and when to step in, still depends on years in the field.
The mare who lingered
Entemahan grew up in a herding family and learned to care for horses from his parents. The centre asks staff not to grow too close to the animals, so that the horses stay wary of people. For him, that has never been easy.
One night in 1999, a mare gave birth to a foal that could not open its eyes. When Entemahan tried to help, the mother bit and kicked him until he scrambled over a fence. Three or four years later, he helped release that same mare. As the team prepared to let her go, she hung back near their vehicle, as if reluctant to leave.
He still wonders whether she remembered him. The moment captured the paradox of his work: years of care, all meant to prepare an animal to live without it.
“I worried whether they could adapt, whether they would find enough food and water,” he says. “But at the same time, they are returning to their true home. It’s such a relief seeing them run freely across the steppe.”
Protecting the land, and the bloodline
A horse can only be as wild as the land allows. The Kalamaili reserve covers more than 14,000 square kilometres of Gobi and desert, ground rich in coal, oil and gold. Oil wells and mines once scarred parts of it. By the end of 2018, more than 280 oil wells had been sealed and the land returned to grassland, the conservation team says.
The other threat is invisible. With so few founders, the herds risk inbreeding. Between 1985 and 2005, the centre brought in 24 more horses from the United States, Britain, Germany and other countries to widen the gene pool. Today, DNA from hair and dung guides breeding decisions, and the centre has cut the relatedness threshold for breeding pairs from about 0.2 to 0.01 or lower, Xue says. Researchers are also studying artificial insemination, which could bring in new bloodlines without moving live horses across continents.
The priority has shifted from numbers to resilience. China now has more than 900 Przewalski’s horses, about a third of the world’s population, with roughly 560 in Xinjiang. Globally, the species was moved from “extinct in the wild” to “endangered” on the IUCN Red List in 2011, a rare reversal.
“When I see wild horses running freely on the steppe, or drinking at a water hole not far from us, that’s when I truly understand the meaning of what we’ve done,” Xue says. His deepest wish is that one day the centre will no longer be needed. “That will be the moment we know our mission is complete.”
Lessons that travel
The horses’ return carries lessons beyond Xinjiang, which shares a border with Pakistan at the Khunjerab Pass, and beyond China’s own conservation drive, part of a wider ecological push in rural regions.
Pakistan has its own stories of species brought back from the brink. The blackbuck, which had disappeared from the wild in Pakistan, was reintroduced to Lal Suhanra National Park near Bahawalpur from captive stock. In the mountains of the north, community-led conservation helped the markhor, Pakistan’s national animal, recover enough to be downgraded by the IUCN from endangered to near threatened in 2015. The Indus river dolphin, found nowhere else in the world, has also increased in number along protected stretches of the Indus, according to WWF-Pakistan surveys.
Each case echoes the Kalamaili lesson: breeding animals is the easy part. Survival depends on habitat, patience and the people on the ground. For Punjab, where forest cover is thin and wildlife habitat is shrinking, that means protecting land as well as animals. Lahore, now home to Pakistan’s first dedicated wildlife hospital, knows the value of skilled vets. Its battle with smog and its efforts to save old trees in its gardens show how closely the health of people and nature are linked, and why, as campaigners argue, the climate fight cannot be left to governments alone.
From pledges to results
The question of how to turn conservation into lasting recovery is at the heart of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17), meeting in Yerevan, Armenia, from October 19 to 30.
It is the first global stocktake under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, which set 23 targets for 2030. Among them: protecting at least 30% of the world’s land, inland waters, coasts and oceans, halting human-caused extinctions, recovering threatened species and reducing conflict between people and wildlife.
At the opening of the China Corner at COP17, China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu said international commitment was growing but progress was still not fast enough to meet the targets, and urged countries to take more concrete and transformative action. Pakistan, like China a party to the convention and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, faces the same test.
The Przewalski’s horses show what that test looks like on the ground. Returning a species is only the start. Keeping it there takes habitat, monitoring, genetic care and decades of commitment, long after the cameras have gone.
Somewhere on the Kalamaili steppe this autumn, a herd is moving towards water it found on its own. That, more than any pledge, is what success looks like.
-Additional inputs on Pakistan by Nayab Siddiqui.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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