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At the beginning of the 20th century, the saiga almost disappeared because of intensive hunting and a few harsh winters. It was only in the 1930s that the saiga population started growing again, under the protection of the Soviet authorities.
By 1950, the recovery allowed commercial hunting to develop in Kazakhstan and Kalmykia. The saiga population was maintained at around a million, thanks to the efforts of the Soviet forest department and a reproduction pattern that allowed the species to grow by up to 60% over one year.
In 1987, a reintroduction project was initiated in Wuwei Endangered Wildlife Breeding Center of Gansu, in order to recover the population of this species in China. From 1993, the saigas were released into an enclosure of 27ha area. The various vegetation types and topography was similar to the habitat in the wild. It provided the animals with a semi-natural condition. Scientific study of animals in such a condition may be a kind of transition from captive to wild. It can play important role in the conservation of target species.
As the rural economy has disintegrated, the saiga has suffered a dramatic increase in poaching (Bekenov et al., 1998). Thus the investigation reported in this thesis includes ecological, epidemiological and socio-economic aspects, all of which were necessary in order to gain a full picture of the dynamics of the infectious diseases of saigas and livestock in Kazakhstan.
We evaluated the repeatability, practical feasibility and
comparability of three techniques for age estimation of saiga
antelopes; the tooth sectioning technique (TS), the tooth eruption
and wear technique (TEW), and a visual ageing technique routinely
used in field studies. We found that TS and TEW gave repeatable
results, and agreed well. The visual method underestimated the age
of males compared to laboratory methods. It assigned animals
consistently to the age class of at least one year old, but less
consistently to the age class less than one year old.