When sixteen Przewalski's horses from Dutch breeding programs landed at Ulaanbaatar airport in June 1992, the critical decision was already made: no state funding, no grant applications. The Hustai National Park would finance itself through ecotourism or not exist. Thirty-four reintroduction years later, that choice produced 380 living takhi. The world's only wild horse species roams its historical steppe homeland again.
1969: The end in the Mongolian steppe
Przewalski's horses, called takhi locally, did not vanish suddenly. Over generations, overhunting, competition with livestock for grazing, and harsh Mongolian winters steadily decimated the population. When the last wild stallion was sighted in 1969, roughly 200 remained worldwide, scattered across zoos and private reserves in Europe and North America. Without the coordinated breeding program already running in those facilities, the species would have disappeared entirely. Mongolia itself held no free-living animals.
June 1992: Sixteen horses come home
On June 5, 1992, sixteen Przewalski's horses from a Dutch breeding program were released in Hustai Nuruu, Mongolia. It was the first step in a reintroduction that continues today. The Mongolian parliament declared the area a nature reserve in 1993. It became a national park in 1998. An independent Mongolian NGO took over management, self-financed entirely by ecotourism revenue, with no state subsidies.
The decision to create no state-run protected area was deliberate. The founders wanted to prove conservation can sustain itself. Today's Hustai National Park is the outcome: self-financed, self-managed, and home to the world's largest free-living takhi population at any single location.
From 16 to 380: Three decades of building
By 2002, the Hustai population had grown to 150 from 84 initially released horses. Today the park holds 380 free-living takhi in 34 breeding harems plus over 80 bachelor stallions. Across Mongolia, roughly 387 takhi are distributed among three rewilding sites: Hustai, Takhin Tal, and Khomiin Tal. Genetic diversity, critically low after the zoo bottleneck, is maintained through international exchange: genetically distant stallions are swapped between breeding programs in China and Mongolia. DNA profiles of more than one hundred animals document kinship.
Globally, roughly 2,000 Przewalski's horses exist in the wild and captivity combined. Mongolia remains the only country where the species lives within its historical range.
In comparison: Two species that came back
The European bison faced a similar cliff. When the last wild bison was shot in the Caucasus in 1927, fewer than 60 lived in zoos. A coordinated European breeding program rebuilt the population over decades. Today roughly 7,000 wild bison roam European forests according to Rewilding Europe. In the past ten years alone, the free-living population nearly tripled from about 2,500 to 7,000.
The Iberian lynx, with fewer than 100 free-living animals in 2002, faced extinction on the Iberian Peninsula. An EU-funded LIFE rewilding program brought it back. By 2024, the IUCN counted 2,401 lynxes in Spain and Portugal, up 19 percent from the prior year. The Iberian lynx is now the only wild cat species globally upgraded by the IUCN from Endangered to Vulnerable status.
Kazakhstan is the next chapter
In June 2024, seven Przewalski's horses from European zoos arrived in Kazakhstan. A second group followed in June 2025. Kazakhstan lies outside previous Mongolian rewilding sites, offering untouched steppe suitable for building a second, genetically complementary wild population. The Iberian lynx program showed how valuable a second wild population can be: Portugal evolved from a buffer zone to an independent center for the species.
The past 34 years reveal what sets takhi comeback apart from other conservation wins: it rested not on a single funding cycle, but on an NGO structure that remained stable across government changes and international crises. That is the hard-to-replicate condition for all future programs.