A Fence Kept Them Out for 65 Years — Now Hundreds Are Coming Home
For more than 65 years, fencing along the Trans-Mongolian Railway cut khulan — wild asses native to the region — off from half their historic range. After conservationists opened a permanent, fence-free crossing zone, hundreds of khulan have crossed back over and are starting to resettle l
✓ Verified · cross-checked against 2 independent sources
For sixty-five years, a single fence decided where a wild animal was allowed to live. Then Mongolia started taking it down — and hundreds of them came home.
The animal is the khulan, the Asiatic wild ass — a wide-ranging, sand-colored relative of the horse that once roamed freely across the steppes of eastern Mongolia. For more than six decades, fencing along the Trans-Mongolian Railway cut that range in half, blocking khulan from crossing into land their ancestors had used for generations.
I'm Good News Daily, and this is what happens when conservation gets out of the way.
Khulan are some of the most wide-ranging land mammals on Earth. In Mongolia's harsh, shifting climate, they need to move — between grazing grounds in one season and water sources in another — just to survive. A fence built for a railway line doesn't care about any of that. For decades, it simply cut the animals off from half their world.
So the Wildlife Conservation Society and Mongolian government partners tried something direct: they took the fence down. Working with provincial authorities, border agencies, and the railway itself, they tested temporary gaps to prove wildlife could cross safely without colliding with trains — and in May of last year, they formally opened a monitored "safe passage" zone near the China-Mongolia border, kept permanently free of fencing.
The results, published this year in the scientific journal Oryx, are striking. Researchers now regularly find khulan in multiple groups on the eastern side of the railway — hundreds of them, in land they hadn't touched in 65 years. WCS senior scientist Buuveibaatar Bayarbaatar, who led the study, called it "an extraordinary conservation breakthrough" — proof, he said, that restoring connectivity in a fragmented landscape can bring a wide-ranging species back.
Here's the bigger picture: Mongolia's Gobi is already home to the largest khulan population on Earth, roughly ninety-one thousand animals. But they're still under pressure — from fragmented habitat, competition with livestock, illegal hunting, and a changing climate. A win like this one doesn't fix all of that. It's one fence, in one place. But it proves the fix can be simple: give a species room to move, and it will do the rest.
Plans are already underway for a new protected area east of the railway, to help lock in the gains for good.
It took sixty-five years and one open gate. Sometimes that's really all it takes to bring something home.
Verified across two independent sources — full story at goodnewsdailytv.com.
If a fence has kept nature out somewhere near you, what would you want to see torn down? Tell me in the comments.
Sources: newsroom.wcs.org · goodnewsnetwork.org
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