Everything about Tibetan Antelope totally explained
» "Chiru" redirects here. For the Indian actor, see Chiranjeevi.
Tibetan antelope or
chiru (
Pantholops hodgsonii) is a medium-sized
bovid which is about 1.2 metres (4 feet) in height. It is native to the
Tibetan plateau including
China's
Tibet Autonomous Region,
Qinghai province, and
Xinjiang province;
India near
Ladakh and formerly western
Nepal. The Tibetan antelope is also known commonly by its Tibetan name
chiru. The coat is grey to reddish-brown, with a white underside. The males have long, curved-back horns which measure about 50 cm (20 inches) in length. There are less than 75000 individuals left in wild, down from a million 50 years ago.
Despite its classification in the
Antilopinae subfamily, recent morphological and molecular evidence suggests that the Chiru is more closely allied to
goats and the subfamily
Caprinae (Gentry 1992, Gatesy
et al. 1992, Ginsberg
et al. 1999).
Tibetan antelope are gregarious, sometimes congregating in herds hundreds strong. The females migrate up to 300 km yearly to calving grounds in the summer where they usually give birth to a single calf, and rejoin the males at the wintering grounds in late autumn (Schaller 1998). Chirus live on the high mountain steppes and semi-desert areas of the Tibetan plateau such as
Kekexili, where they feed on various
forb and
grass species. The average life span is about eight years.
Tibetan antelope are listed as endangered by the
World Conservation Union and the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service due to commercial poaching for their underwool, competition with local domesticated herds, and the development of their rangeland for gold mining. The Chiru's wool, known as
shahtoosh, is warm, soft and fine. The wool can only be obtained by killing the animal; Its numbers have dropped accordingly from nearly a million (estimated) at the turn of the 20th century to less than 75,000 today. The numbers continue to drop yearly. The struggle to stop illegal antelope hunting was portrayed in the 2004 film, .
In July 2006 the Chinese government inaugurated a new railway that bisects the chiru’s feeding grounds on its way to
Lhasa, the
Tibetan capital. In an effort to avoid harm to the animal, thirty-three special animal migration passages have been built beneath the railway. However, the railway will bring many more people, including potential poachers, closer to the chiru’s breeding grounds and habitat.
On February 22, 2008,
The Wall Street Journal Online reported that China's state-run news agency,
Xinhua, issued a public apology for publishing a
doctored photograph of Tibetan antelope running near the Qinghai-Xizang railway. Liu Weiqing, a 41-year-old photographer, was identified as the author of the work. He had reportedly camped on the Tibetan plateau since March 2007, as part of a series by the Daqing Evening News, to raise awareness regarding the Tibetan bovid. He was also under contract to provide images to Xinhua. He has since resigned from Daqing Evening News.Despite the impression given by the faked photo, the antelope are getting used to the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway, according to a letter to
Nature on April 17, 2008 from researchers of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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