Why is mongolia suitable for herding

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As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. The two groups proposed intermarriage between the two groups in order to stabilize the country. In , Western powers recognized the sovereignty of Mongolia, while Inner Mongolia remained a province of China. There are two main factors that explain the decline of the herding economy: The end and privatization of livestock cooperatives and state farms and climate change.

As a result, the socio-economic repercussions rapidly created a new underclass of extremely impoverished families.

These families are predominantly unemployed migrant herders with few livestock to support them. In , environmental challenges dealt a fatal blow to the last surviving migrant herders.

Thus, around , migrant herders seeking employment flocked to Ulaanbaatar with their families. Due to their lack of income, many families had to live in yurts around the urban centers. Image used with permission of photographer, Graham Taylor, GoMongolia. Nomadic herders live in Mongolia, tending herds of sheep, goats, camels, yaks, and horses just as their ancestors have for more than 3, years.

The herders understand the land and its environment from traditional ecological knowledge passed down through generations and from daily experience; they recognize when the climate changes. Mongolian ger. Herder families live in canvas wool tents called a ger. To erect a ger, a canvas covering is draped over a frame of wooden supports, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. The roof slants downward from the center, meeting a round wall of wooden lattice. Once in place, beds, dressers, and rugs are moved inside and a cooking stove is positioned with its pipe passing through the center of the roof.

A ger can be set up within one hour. Spring migration to lowlands. When a herder family moves, the ger can be taken down, folded, and placed on the back of a camel or yak in similar time. In the north, herders move with the seasons to fresh grazing pastures near rivers or ponds for the spring and summer and move up to the mountains for the fall and winter in the north. In the south where water is scarce, herders will move at least 20 times a year.

The diet of Mongolian herders primarily consists of milk, yoghurt, cheese, and mutton. Gantumur, a year-old Mongolian herder, spreads a plastic bag on the ground, offering its contents of bran to the sheep. As she eats, he sits next to his horse, using the animal for protection against a bitter wind that ruffles his knee-length deel overcoat, its thick blue cloth flecked with horse hair.

But even with the additional sustenance, he worries about the mother, her wool falling in clumps off a thin body. He has already lost 60 of his goats and sheep, after a fierce winter that has taken a grim toll on the Mongolian steppe. The spectacular expanse of undulating grassland has long sustained the country, but has come under threat from climate change and overuse, which in recent years has killed huge numbers of animals and propelled a human exodus from the land that is eroding one of the last nomadic cultures on Earth.

Gantumur, a year-old Mongolian herder, rides past a dead cow near Adaatsag, Mongolia April 16, Gantumur has already lost 60 of his goats and sheep, after a fierce winter that has taken a grim toll on the Mongolian steppe. Across Mongolia, nearly , animals have already died from this year's dzud , a weather phenomenon in which a summer of drought is followed by a winter of cold and heavy snow.

Today, carcasses lie in dry gulches and dried-out watering holes, their exposed skin gleaming in the sun after herders stripped hides to salvage some value. Many more animals died from large numbers of miscarriages. The dzud is part of the Mongolian landscape. Elder herders recall great numbers of livestock felled by dzud conditions in and But what once took place on a lengthy cycle now appears to be coming with more frequency.

Huge numbers of animals died in , and then again in , before this year's dzud — which although regional and not as deadly as earlier iterations, is still expected to kill more than a million livestock.

Then it went to a year pattern. And now it seems we have come to a five-year pattern," said Quentin Moreau, country director for People in Need, a Czech disaster response organization. Driven in part by the emotional toll of losing animals under their care, herders themselves are abandoning the steppe. Between and , the number of Mongolian herders fell from a half-million to , Mongolia's herder culture, one of the last on Earth, is "just dying.

It's only a matter of time until we're going to probably end up with a symbolic number of herders, and that's it," Mr. Moreau said. Dusmaa, 64, lives just outside Adaatsag lost more than livestock this past winter.