Big decline in Mongolian saiga antelope population

ULAANBAATAR (GoGo Mongolia/ANN) -About 693 saiga antelopes have died in Mongolia due to a  rinderpest, accoding to government data released on January 9. 

The Mongolian government has decided to allocate US$180,000 for saiga antelope conservation. 

Mongolian saiga antelopes, one of the most threatened species on the planet, inhabit six sub-divisions of Gobi-Altai and Khovd provinces, the western Mongolia. 

In 2015, saiga population in Mongolia stood at 13,000 while their global population was estimated at 120,000. 

Today, saiga are only found in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Mongolia. All of the saiga’s range states were part of the Soviet Union or China for most of the last century. Saiga went extinct in China in the 1960s.

Saiga are one of the fastest-declining mammal species on our planet today. Since the early 1990s more than 95 per cent of the saiga population has disappeared. There is considerable international concern, and saiga have been listed as Critically Endangered by IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

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