Kazakhstan is considering culling endangered antelope after population boom – Science-Environment News – Report by AFR

Kazakhstan is considering culling its endangered saiga antelope, the environment ministry told AFP on Thursday after citing scientific advice on the threat to agriculture since population recovery.

Conservation efforts, which have included a crackdown on poaching, have caused Kazakhstan’s saiga population to surge from under 200,000 after a die-off in 2015 to 1.3 million ahead of this year’s spring calving season, officials said.

“We have scientific advice on how to regulate the population of saiga,” a spokeswoman said.

“We’re investigating, but no final decision has been made yet,” she added, without giving a deadline for the decision, which is expected to affect about 80,000 animals.

The vast steppe of the former Soviet country is home to much of the world’s saiga, known for their distinctive bulbous nose and horns, whose status in Chinese medicine fueled poaching.

The Russian region of Kalmykia and Mongolia are home to smaller numbers of the animal.

A hunting ban introduced in the late 1990s is due to expire in 2023, and Kazakhstan’s Environment Minister Serikkali Brekeshev hinted on Wednesday that the ministry had “made a decision” to regularly kill up to 10 percent of western Kazakhstan’s Ural saiga population — the largest of three saiga populations in the Central Asian nation.

“Today … saigas are migrating not only to pasture, but also to farmland. That’s definitely a problem,” Brekeshev was quoted as saying by local media.

However, the ministry spokeswoman told AFP that any decision would have to be approved by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and that “society’s position” would be taken into account.

Kazakhstan’s leadership stepped up its crackdown on illegal hunting in 2019 after two state rangers were killed by poachers, sparking public anger.

The saiga die-off in Kazakhstan in 2015 wiped out more than half of the world’s population at the time, caused by a nasal bacterium that scientists later determined was spreading in unusually warm and humid conditions.