The science on Mongolia’s giant sheep tells a different story than the headline.
By Dr. Robert Kröger, Founder and Executive Director, The Origins Foundation
BIO: Dr Robert Kröger is a restoration ecologist originally from South Africa but now is based in the United States of America. His work through the non-profit he started, The Origins Foundation, aims to showcase the true consequence, benefit, and impact of sustainable use of wildlife globally.
Let me start with what this piece is not about. I don’t care who hunted with whom. Questions about wedding gifts, oligarchs and charity auctions belong to journalists and congressional committees. What I care about is the sheep, and the people who live alongside that wildlife in some of the most remote country on earth.
On October 27, Forbes ended its headline with ” … And Killed An Endangered Sheep.” The animal was an Altai argali (Ovis ammon ammon), taken in western Mongolia in August, according to a guide quoted in the Financial Times reporting. I’m a restoration ecologist. I’ve spent my career reading population data, and when a major outlet uses a scientific term to tell millions of readers that a hunter pushed a vanishing species toward the edge, the record needs correcting. Here is what the peer-reviewed science and the government documents actually say.
“Endangered” is a scientific category, and it is the wrong one.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the argali as near threatened, one category above least concern and two below endangered. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists argali in Mongolia as threatened, not endangered, a status it reviewed and retained in 2002. That federal decision is exactly why legally hunted Mongolian argali can be imported into the United States. These are not interchangeable words.
The Altai argali (Ovis ammon ammon) is the largest wild sheep on earth, the nominate form of the species. It lives in the high, cold steppe of the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia, with smaller numbers spilling into Russia, China and Kazakhstan. Rams carry massive curled horns; ewes carry the longest horns of any female argali. According to the Handbook of the Mammals of the World, the Mongolian Altai holds the core of the subspecies, an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 animals, while Kazakhstan’s southern Altai holds no more than about 100.
The same account names the threats plainly: competition with livestock that pushes argali into marginal habitat, diseases spread from domestic herds, and illegal hunting for meat and horns. Poaching and winter starvation are the leading causes of death. Regulated hunting is not on that list.
A population history, honestly told
Mongolia began managing argali hunting in 1953. Foreign trophy hunting started in 1967, and between then and 1989 the state permitted the taking of about 1,630 rams, an average of roughly 74 a year across the whole country.
The real collapse came later, and its cause is well documented. After the fall of socialism, herds were privatized and livestock exploded, from 24.7 million animals in 1989 to 32.9 million in 1998. Goats and sheep moved into argali range. Poaching surged in a collapsed rural economy. Then came the brutal winters of 1999 to 2002, when one third of Mongolia’s livestock, 11 million animals, died. By 2001, government estimates put the country’s argali at 13,000 to 15,000, a 72% decline from 1975.
The hunting system of that era deserves criticism, and I won’t pretend otherwise. WWF Mongolia pointed out that licensing still ran the way it had under socialism, with no mechanism for local herders to benefit from the animals on their land. A sheep worth $20,000 to the state in fees was worth nothing to the family grazing beside it, except as meat. WWF’s prescription was not a ban. It was the opposite: give local people a stake through sustainable use, so that, in their words, the user can become the protector. This same system is in neighboring countries like Nepal and many other countries around the world.
What changed, and what the counts show since
The first repeatable, published national survey, in November 2002, estimated 20,226 argali. The authors found an abundance of older rams in hunted areas and concluded that trophy hunting had not been excessive. When the same team repeated the same protocol in November 2009, the estimate was 26,155, an increase of 29.3%, while quota hunting continued. An independent 2009 national survey concluded that legal trophy hunting and poaching were not limiting argali on a national scale; climate and weather were.
The harvest itself is selective in the way biology says it should be. Comparing 64 legally hunted rams with 116 that died naturally, Frisina and Frisina found trophy rams were taken only three months to a year younger than the age at which rams die on their own. Spring 2009 counts in hunted ranges found 73% of rams older than five and 47 lambs per 100 ewes, strong breeding structure and strong recruitment. Much of that survey work was paid for by hunters and Mongolian outfitters.
In 2012, Mongolia reformed its trophy hunting system, restricting hunting to designated areas run by a management body that can be a local NGO or community organization. Since 2023, permits have been sold at auction, and the government reports that every hunting area now operates under a conservation management plan, with local managers funding protection work.
Gulzat: what sustainable use looks like on the ground
The clearest test is in Uvs province, the same province where this August’s hunt began. The Gulzat Local Protected Area is, in the United Nations Development Program’s words, one of the few hunting areas in Mongolia where argali hunting is controlled and local communities receive benefits. 198 herder households formed 13 community organizations, and every member acts as a ranger. Former poachers became guardians.
The result: argali at Gulzat reached about 1,500 by 2018, double the 2011 count and four times the 2003 inventory. The growth was large enough that Uvs province’s hunting quotas increased. The 2024 transboundary census counted 1,664 argali in Uvs. This is the model working as designed: a sheep worth more alive on the mountain than in a poacher’s truck.
The contrast across the border
Russia has banned argali hunting since 1934. A ban did not save its sheep. Poaching persisted, and by 2010 an estimated 600 to 700 argali remained in Russia. Numbers rebounded only after national-park enforcement arrived, from 525 on the Sailugem Ridge in 2014 to 3,756 in 2024, and the authors of that 2025 study credit part of the growth to sheep moving across from the Mongolian side, where a hunted population is supplying animals to a protected one. The lesson is not that protection fails. It is that protection on paper fails, and what works is enforcement and people on the ground who care. Sustainable use is the model that pays for both.
The mechanism is the same everywhere. In a 12-year experiment in Mongolia’s Gobi, simply moving livestock off key argali habitat raised juvenile survival from 18% to 50%. Grass and poachers set the ceiling for argali. Somebody has to pay herders to share the grass and to stop the poaching. In the Altai, hunting revenue is that somebody.
Beyond the argali
The same principle runs through other Mongolian species. The 2009 national survey estimated tens of thousands of Siberian ibex and concluded that legal hunting is not limiting them either. Local quotas now follow local counts: in Khovd’s Tsetseg district, ibex permits were set from a 2013 survey, while argali permits were withheld for four years because numbers there were low (Page 2015).
Sustainable use means putting a value on a living wild resource so that people have a reason to keep it. Hunting is one way to do that. Fishing is another, and Mongolia’s rivers hold one of the best examples I know.
The taimen (Hucho taimen) is the world’s largest salmonid, reaching up to 2 meters and more than 90 kilograms. It can live for decades, grows slowly, and is listed as endangered on Mongolia’s red list. Across its range, dams, pollution and overfishing have cut it back. Yet some remote Mongolian rivers still hold robust populations, and the Eg–Uur watershed in the north is home to one of the country’s largest.
There, the Taimen Conservation Fund built a program around a catch-and-release sport fishery, with licensed fishing concessions designed to return revenue to local communities and conservation. Scientists then tested whether that fishery was helping or hurting. Using mark–recapture data and a population model, Jensen and colleagues (2009), writing in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, found that the catch-and-release fishery likely reduced taimen abundance, biomass and mean weight by less than 10%. If the same fish had been kept, as they are elsewhere in Mongolia, the model gave a 57% chance the population would eventually be wiped out.
That is sustainable use in one result. Visiting anglers pay to catch a fish they release, local people earn from the river, and a fish that would be speared or netted becomes worth more alive. The argali in the mountains and the taimen in the rivers are protected by the same idea.
The people the headline forgot
None of this means Mongolia’s system is perfect. In 2019, ProPublica reported that a permit for an earlier argali hunt was issued after the fact. Hunters should be the loudest voices demanding that every permit be issued in advance, every quota rest on a survey, and every dollar be traceable to the field. Transparency is how sustainable use keeps its license. Mislabeling the species and treating every legal hunt as a scandal fixes none of it.
The herders of Uvs and Bayan-Ölgii will never read Forbes. But headlines like this one shape import rules in Washington and policy in Ulaanbaatar, and those decisions land on them. Take the value out of a living argali, and the families of Gulzat lose their reason to guard it. The sheep loses its best protection.
Forbes should correct “endangered” to “near threatened.” And the next time a hunt makes a headline, readers deserve the rest of the story: who issued the permit, what it cost, where the money went, and what has happened to the animals since.
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