Kazakh horses are the oldest of domestic breeds that continues to inhabit the territories of its original formation said a Russian scientist Leonid Gaiduchenko.
Gaiduchenko believes domestic horses were originally brought to Kazakh steppes by the tribes that migrated from South-Eastern Europe.
“During my research I came to еру conclusion that during the Neolithic age, tribes that came to Kazakhstan from South-Eastern Europe through the corridor between the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains brought domesticated cows and horses. We saw the traces of those tribes in Turgay and Botay areas of Pavlodar Oblasts when studying the unique monument of the Neolithic period near Lake Borly and in Kulundy area. Echoes of this way of life can also be found in the Southern Ural,” the scientist said.
According to Gaiduchenko, the ancient domestic horse in Kazakh steppes was medium or small sized and had thick legs. The animal was notable for its stamina and adaptiveness to harsh conditions.
In addition, Gaiduchenko thinks that Kazakh horse is the direct ancestor of a number of Eastern breeds. “The Kazakh horse that developed in the Kazakh steppes in the fifth century BC is the living artifact of horse-breeding activities of Ugrian, Indo-European and Turkic groups living in the steppes in the past seven thousand years. I think, the horse can be and should be made a Kazakhstani brand. It is the oldest domestic horse breed that still exists. It does not only live today, but also flourishes – the Kazakh horse is being bred again,” Gaiduchenko said.
We all know that parrots and certain other birds can learn to talk. And most of us are aware that the Great Apes, i.e., chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, can be taught to communicate in American sign language. But have you ever heard of a talking elephant?
I recently discovered an extraordinary story of an Asian elephant called Batyr. Born in 1969, Batyr was a lifelong resident of the Karaganda Zoo in Kazakhstan. According to Wikipedia, Batyr was separated from his mother early on, and was the sole elephant in the Karaganda zoo. He never saw or interacted with other elephants. His only companions were his caretakers at the zoo. Elephants are very social animals, so it is only natural that Batyr identified with and imitated his human associates.
No one set about to teach Batyr to talk. By all acounts, he taught himself. In fact, his unique ability was first discovered by a night watchman at the zoo. The startled man reported he had heard the elephant talking to himself. (the Daily Telegraph Newspaper, April 9,1980) Batyr is said to have had a vocabulary of about 20 words and phrases in the Russian and Kazakh languages. He talked to his attendants or to himself, but his speech was frequently witnessed by amazed zoo visitors. Translated into English, his vocabulary included his name (Batyr), “water,” “good,” “bad,” “go,” “the fool,” “yes,” “give,” “grandma,” and “penis”. Phrases included, “I’m Batyr,” “Good Batyr,” “Bad Batyr,” “Batyr is hungry,” “One, two, three,” and “F*** you”.
Not surprisingly, Batyr’s astounding purported linguistic abilities caught the attention of the scientific community. The Soviet scientist A. N. Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff studied Batyr and made audiovisual recordings of him speaking. Dr. Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff described how Batyr produced human speech by pressing the tip of his trunk against the bottom of his jaw (simulating lips) and also using his tongue. Batyr was the subject of various scientific articles and zoological conferences in the 1980’s and ’90’s. These were primarily, if not exclusively, in Russia and former Soviet states.
Sadly, Batyr suffered an untimely death in 1993 when his caretakers gave him an accidental overdose of medication. It seems a shame that Batyr was and is so little known and little appreciated in the United States. I suppose it can be attributed to a combination of language, cultural, and political barriers. There is also much skepticism and ongoing controversy in the scientific community where issues of animal language and animal intelligence are concerned. It is hard to fathom why so many scientists, as well as nonscientists, are threatened by evidence of animal intelligence on a level comparable to a human pre-schooler. Is anyone afraid that pre-schoolers will take over the world?
Batyr was only about 24 years old when he died–a young adult who had so much promise. I can just imagine the delightful fellow frolicking happily in elephant heaven, blowing water out his trunk, and uttering the occasional gleeful “I’m Batyr, good Batyr, one, two, three, f*** you!”
Kosik is Alive and Talking!
Kosik is an Asian elephant at the Everland theme park and zoo in Seoul, South Korea. Like his predecessor, Batyr, he reportedly taught himelf to speak (Korean) by imitating his caretakers. He uses the same trunk-in-mouth method to produce human-like speech. And hIs ability to speak was discovered in the same way. Zoo workers outside his enclosure heard him talking to himself, initially thinking a person was in the enclosure. (See Science Magazine, 6 Oct. 2006 at sciencemag.org, and Wikipedia article, “Kosik”.)
Kosik’s vocabulary is said to include about eight words and phrases. Among these are “Yes,” “No,” “foot,” “good,” “Sit,”and “Lie down”. At the time of the videotaped newscast (Youtube video above) in 2006, a zoo spokesperson indicated plans were in the works for scientists to study Kosik’s vocalizations to determine if he understood the word meanings or was simply mimicking. Is this not a ridiculous issue? It is obvious he is repeating verbal commands used by his keepers. Dogs understand the same commands. They demonstrate their understanding by obeying the commands, as do elephants. It would be far more interesting and useful to have a speech and language therapist work with Kosik to see how much his vocabulary and expressive speech could be expanded through training. For that matter, why not experiment with training other elephants, both Asian and African, to speak?
I think most people these days have heard of elephants that paint. It is a wide-spread and well-known phenomenon. I suppose it is easier to teach an elephant to paint than to talk. But that does not explain the near-silence in the Western media on the subject of talking elephants. Where are the television documentaries and news segments? If the elephant does not speak our language, does it not count? Asian elephant gets art lesson
A burial pit for some of the more than 120,000 saiga antelope that have died in central Kazakhstan.Credit Sergei Khomenko/ FAO
Updated, May 30, 8:00 a.m. | The numbers and images that describe a mass dying of the critically endangered saiga, the world’s northernmost antelope species, on the grassy steppe in the Betpak-dala region of Kazakhstan are stunning.
Below, you can read why I see good odds that this eco-cataclysm was caused by a communal binge on noxious weeds that thrive in the region in warm, wet springs. (It has been wet there. The closest city to the area where the die-off occurred, Astana, reported that a month’s worth of rain fell on a single day, May 16.) [An update from the field, appended below, indicates odds of a dietary cause are dropping.]
The enormous new saiga die-off is particularly devastating to conservation biologists because efforts to cut poaching (for meat and “medicinal” horns) were gaining steam in recent years. (Visit the websites of the Saiga Conservation Alliance and Wildlife Conservation Society for more.)
The ancient species had numbered more than a million a century ago and — in a crash similar to that of the American bison in the 19th century — was reduced to a few tens of thousands of animals at its nadir. That crash has been blamed on booming meat demand after the fall of the Soviet Union, but some research points to subtler issues. In 2009, the saiga conservationist Elena Bykovadescribed the 1990s crash as “the fastest decline ever recorded for a mammal species.”
Over the past week, speculation on the cause has focused on various diseases, including ailments related to bacteria found in some specimens by an international team that has raced to the region.
This excerpt from the U.N. news release, though, stresses that those pathogens are not triggers:
[I]t is becoming clear that two secondary opportunistic pathogens, specifically Pasteurella and Clostridia, are contributing to the rapid and wide-spread die-off. However, the hunt for the fundamental drivers of the mass mortality continues since these bacteria are only lethal to an animal if its immune system is already weakened.
Andy Coghlan has written an excellent overview for New Scientist, including this reaction from Richard Kock, a scientist from the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, England, who has done extensive research on the species:
It’s very dramatic and traumatic, with 100-percent mortality…. I know of no example in history with this level of mortality, killing all the animals and all the calves.
Update, May 29, 5:47 p.m. | Richard Kock sent this cautionary note by email, stressing that weeks of analysis will be required to nail down what happened:
We just need to try to gather all the evidence we can from the animals and the environment. In the end this will guide us to the pathogenesis of this problem. Until then much of what you will read is speculation.. We have a pretty good idea of the proximate cause of death but less understanding of possible triggers but noxious weeks I doubt, as the steppe was looking pretty good over this die off and the animals are highly selective so not likely to make mistakes on diet. Rich grass might upset the stomach and rain and warmth can promote this so perhaps a factor but we will need a lot of work to prove this. Hopefully it will be done.
Updated, May 30, 7:48 a.m. | A new update from Kock cuts against a dietary cause:
It is dose that matters and no evidence any single plant was in abundance in the rumen other than grasses. The ingestion of nutrient dense grasses might have led to some ruminal disorder and subsequent tympany and toxicosis. The animals in these outbreaks were eating mainly wheat grass from my limited examination of grazed plants and a few more of their normal food plants – no evidence for pure plant toxicity remember they are highly selective feeders! But pasture analysis would help including toxicology to rule this out and also looking at other potential toxic factors – perhaps in water although plenty of this around this year – I doubt algal toxicosis as a trigger but all this should be ruled out.
A healthy group of endangered saiga antelopes. Successful conservation efforts have been set back by a mass die-off in Kazakhstan.Credit Saiga Conservation Alliance
Friday morning, I began sifting the literature on saiga mortality and found strong hints of a possible cause in a study of smaller saiga die-offs in 2010 (12,000 animals) and 2011 (just 450) in the animal’s westernmost population, in the Urals.
But it’s full of fascinating relevant information.
The first thing that struck me was the similarity in timing. Those events and this year’s mass dying were in mid to late May.
The reported symptoms in the dead and dying animals are the same, as well: foaming at the mouth, diarrhea and bloating.
The paper on the Urals deaths also notes that well before the 2010 and 2011 events, there had been previous die-offs including in 1955, 1956, 1958, 1967, 1969, 1974, 1981 and 1988.
By email, I reached Til Dieterich, one of the authors of the paper on the Ural-region dyings. He said:
As with an airplane crash, there is not only one cause behind this and it is not unprecedented…. In 1988 there was a mass death with 434,000 animals dead (68 percent of the population) more or less in the same region.
For more detail, read the abstract from his paper, co-written with Bibigul Sarsenova:
Mass death of Saiga antelopes took place from 18 to 21 May 2010 in the north west of West Kazakhstan province northeast and southeast of Borsy (about 12.000 dead animals found). In August and September the forage basis of Saiga antelope in the mass death area was investigated.
Mass growth of potentially poisonous Brassicacea species for ruminants could be found on abandoned fields in the area (Lepidium perfoliatum, Lepidium ruderale, Descurainia sophia and Thlaspi arvense). Due to favorable warm and wet weather conditions in spring 2010 the mass growth of these annual Brassicacea species occurred on a big scale. Even though Saiga is capable to eat large amount of this plants, they are poisonous to ruminants when consumed in large amounts.
In addition lush growth of Brassicacea and Poacea species (Poa bulbosa, Eremophyrum triticeum, Leymus ramosus, Elytrigia repens) providing high protein forage, can cause the observed symptoms of foamy fermentation, diarrhea and bloating. The animals thus could have been killed by extreme bloating and/or acute pulmonary edema (“fog fever”) after foraging on wet and highly nutritious “fog pastures.” Qualitative investigations in the field confirmed that the animals ate most above-mentioned species….
In addition the animals have been congregating for calving, which does contribute to a higher background stress. The results of the investigation suggest that a combination of at least some of the above listed factors is responsible for the tragic events.
Here’s the paper’s concluding section:
In both years the Saiga death events started just after the females and their 1–2 week old young started to move again. During the first 10 days of the calving time the females did not leave their young and not even move to the nearby water places for drinking. In both cases the calving sites where some meters higher and covered either by mainly steppe vegetation (2010, Stipa-Festuca Steppe) or Leymus ramosus grassland on fallow fields. Thus the moist pastures where presumably more intensively used during the death event. Nevertheless the heavy rain events just before or during the death event, did certainly lead to very moist fodder especially in the morning hours. In 2010 even fog was reported by the locals just before the dying started. The local people also reported, that Lepidium species do cause diarrhea in cattle and after heavy rain events herders do not let their livestock out to the pastures before noon.
Wet and warm weather conditions have also been reported for the Betbak Dala Population during the spring death events in 1981 and 1988. The animals have also been calving for the first time in the Borsy area usually using pastures further south in the semi desert region. Part of the Saiga population did actually calve further south in the semi-desert area 2011 and no deaths were reported here. Wet weather conditions in spring combined with lush pastures are thus obviously problematic to Saiga.
The paper includes recommendations to limit risks of such events going forward:
With this evidence on hand we recommend in similar wet years to keep Saiga off such dangerous pastures and train the responsible rangers in identifying the described dangerous conditions. If it turns out difficult or dangerous for the Saiga population to keep them off dangerous pastures, the relevant areas should just be cut during the time when the animals are immobile during the first 10 days of calving. Cutting the dangerous pastures will prevent excessive development of toxins and protein in the plants. Even if the plants are eaten dry the risk of negative effects is minimized.
The authors warn against expanding agriculture in saiga territory, noting that plowing or herbicide use would simply lead to mass growth of the weedy toxic species in the cleared area. “This will enlarge the risk of pasture problems even more,” they wrote.
There’ll be much more to report in the coming days.
The Saiga Conservation Alliance has set up an emergency fund to help support analysis of the die-off and steps to protect the species.
Britons Yvonne Taylor (L), 35, and Lucy Groom, 27, from campaign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), hold a protest to urge Kazakhs to go vegetarian near the Independence monument in Almaty December 12, 2006. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov
In a Strange Message, Britons Urge Kazakhs Not to Eat Meat
Two British animal rights activists dressed in lettuce bikinis braved the winter chill in the Kazakh commercial capital Almaty on December 12 to urge Kazakhs to stop eating meat and turn vegetarian.
The activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said they were inspired by the spoof movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” but said their message was positive.
“We come with a positive message: how to live a healthier, longer life,” said Yvonne Taylor, one of the two Lettuce Ladies, her teeth chattering as they stood in Almaty’s main square in freezing temperatures, as reported by the Press.
Regarding the two activists in Kazakhstan, PETA said in a statement, “The scantily clad beauties are asking the people of Almaty to mark the New Year by switching from dishes like beshbarmak (horse meat and noodles) and zhambas (baked sheep’s head) to healthy and humane meatless alternatives.” (For the record, baked sheep’s head is called bas, while zhambas refers to a thigh, which is also served for distinguished guests.)
The activists held small Kazakh national flags and signs that read: “Let Vegetarianism Grow in You.”
“We are OK, just about,” said activist Lucy Groom by the end of their 30 minute action. “We are suffering because we care about animals. We believe that people of Kazakhstan also care about animals.”
Batyr the Talking Elephant
Asian elephant gets art lesson
to Kazakhstan 