S is for saiga antelopes
In 1993, over a million saiga antelopes roamed the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan. Today, fewer than 30,000 remain, most of them females. So many males have been shot for their horns, which are exported to China to be used in traditional fever cures, that the antelope may not be able to recover unaided.
The slaughter is embarrassing for conservationists. In the early 1990s, groups such as WWF actively encouraged the saiga hunt, promoting its horn as an alternative to the horn of the endangered rhino.
Saiga (Saiga tatarica) once dominated the open steppes from Ukraine to Mongolia. They have always been hunted for meat, horns and skins. However, even in Soviet times, hunters killed tens of thousands each year, without dramatically lowering the population.
But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lucrative market in the horns has opened up, with hunters using motorcycles and high-powered weapons to chase and kill their quarry. In China, saiga horns fetch around $100 a kilogram. Organised gangs illegally export the horn by train from Moscow to Beijing, or across the border from Kazakhstan.
Black with antelopes
“The plains used to be black with these antelopes, but now you can go out there and not see any at all,” says Abigail Entwistle, a zoologist from Fauna and Flora International, a British-based charity. “This is the most sudden change in fortune for a large mammal species recorded in recent times.”
Decline of the saiga antelope
The closest comparison may be with the African elephant, which faced a similar poaching frenzy in the 1980s, causing its numbers to fall from a million to half a million in a decade. But the saiga’s numbers, which started at a similar level, have fallen by 97 per cent.
The scale of the slaughter, and its almost total destruction of the male saiga, has overwhelmed the animals’ famed fecundity. “We don’t know of any case in biology where the sex ratio has gone so wrong that fecundity has crashed in this way,” says Eleanor Milner-Gulland of Imperial College, London, the leading expert in the West on the species.
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