Known to Mongolians as takhi and to the rest of the world as Przewalski’s horse, they are the only equine breed never to be domesticated – and the fruits of one of the most successful ever wildlife reintroduction schemes. With their stocky bodies and thick necks, they resemble ponies more than horses.

Hunted to extinction in the wild in the 1960s, today there are nearly 1,000 Przewalski’s horses at three sites in Mongolia, with more in China and Kazakhstan. The biggest population – numbering 423 – is in central Mongolia’s Hustai national park, the descendants of 84 animals airlifted from European zoos in the 1990s.

Each year they attract tens of thousands of visitors to this small patch of pristine mountain steppe just 100km from the capital, Ulaanbaatar.

The success stands in stark contrast to other parts of Mongolia. Over the past three decades, the country’s wildlife has been decimated by a combination of hunting, the climate crisis and overgrazing, with creeping desertification turning huge tracts of its vast grasslands into dust.

This crisis began with the fall of the iron curtain in the 1990s, which heralded the end of Mongolia’s communist era and forced an abrupt transition to a free-market economy. The result was economic chaos, shuttered factories and mass unemployment. The effects were devastating. Red deer numbers plummeted from 130,000 in 1986 to just 8,000 by 2004, while the marmot population fell from 40 million to 5 million in 2002. Between 1999 and 2004, numbers of saiga, a type of bulbous-nosed antelope, dropped by 85%; and argali, a wild mountain sheep with spiral horns, fell by 75% between 1975 and 2001.