WTF? 3,200 Endangered Antelopes All Dead Within a Small Area

Maybe if we find out why these animals are endangered in the first place....that might reveal some clues.

Peace

Clearly there is speculation as to the cause of this incident :

In an interview with Kazakhstan's media a hunter from West Kazakhstan region declared that the official version of pasteurellosis is unlikely, while there is an obvious poisoning of saiga. During visual examination of dead animals, sanitary doctors discovered a swollen belly, and on the faces of the animals -- green-coloured foam. The reason, according to Rangers, could have been poisonous chemicals, scattered from helicopters over the fields.

People of Zhanibek district of West Kazakhstan region, who first discovered the cases in animals, are confident that the real reason is the Russian missile military training ground "Kapustin Yar", which is located nearby. Villagers told that the local steppe was strewn with white powder, and just before the death of the animals a black gray cloud appeared in the air, although the weather was clear and cloudless. At the same time people felt, during these days, sharply deteriorated [acutely ill?] and villagers were seeking for medical help.

We have further noted from reliable sources as follows. The Western Kazakhstan lab diagnosed _Pasteurella_ and ruled out both FMD (foot-and-mouth disease) and PPR (peste des petits ruminants). The National Monitoring Centre and Reference lab for diagnosis and veterinary medicine in Astana, Kazakhstan is pursuing tests of samples but no definitive infectious agent has yet been isolated.

Interestingly, mass mortality of saigas in 1988 that was attributed
to pasteurellosis was, reportedly, thought by some senior scientists
at the Kazakh Veterinary Science Research Institute (KazNIVI) to have
been caused by something the saigas encountered when grazing close to
a military base. The whole area was closed off after the saigas died,
and senior officials from Moscow were flown in to take part in the
investigation. Scientists at KazNIVI felt the incident was 'hushed up'
and too quickly attributed to pasteurellosis (see page 17 in: Monica
Lundervold: Infectious diseases of saiga antelopes and domestic
livestock in Kazakhstan. Thesis, University of Warwick, UK June 2001.

Source

Saving the Saiga

Poachers, or illegal hunters, kill them for their horns, which are used in medicine. A million of these antelopes lived on the earth just 15 years ago, but only a few thousand survive today.

Were these animals intact or did were they missing their horns??

Peace

Aha....here we go. Just a bunch of p*ssed off farmers who feel left out in cold by their government. This article is speaking about farmers in the eastern part of India but I guess those Kazakhstani farmers encounter the same problem....

Antelopes play havoc with crops in Bihar

Antelopes have become a major cause of worry for farmers in Bihar who are on a strict vigil round the clock these days to protect their crops from being affected in Bihar’s Paliganj area.

Farmers are in a state of abject panic and are disappointed at the inaction of the government and keep a vigil. The hardest part of all this is to stay put entire night in the open when mercury plummets

“Government is not helping us at all. They say that animal slaughter is an offence but are we left with any choice?” said Om Prakash, a farmer, Paliganj.

My guess, they poisoned these animals to protect their crops.......can you blaim them??

Peace

reply to post by sherpa


Just spent 3 minutes checking into the subject and found this,

Former Soviet Biological Weapons
Facilities in Kazakhstan:
Past, Present, and Future

Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project

Occasional Paper No. 1

INSTITUTE CENTER FOR NONPROLIFERATION STUDIES
MONTEREY

Gulbarshyn Bozheyeva
Yerlan Kunakbayev
Dastan Yeleukenov

Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project

Link to the pdf file Nonprolifeproject

"operation mindcrime"
Im going out on a limb here , but some farmers creating gray fog and poisoning around 12000 saigas is pretty far stretched while there is a facility there with the words, "biological and nonproliferation" in it ,that they rather had something to do with it.

Source

reply to post by Spacedman13


Looking at a population study that was carried out ten years ago there does seem to be a steady decline in the Saiga but the operative word is steady clearly mass mortality as in this case is not the norm.

Disease can be a common component in large scale die offs but again from the study this seems not to be the case generally :

Saiga population sizes are strongly affected by climatic variability and disease (Bekenov et al., 1998), although these are unlikely to be major causes of the declines

My emphasis.

Source study

It seems odd that the white powder which was reported in this incident linked in my previous post was not sampled and analysed there may be several reasons for this :

1. This may not have been present when the investigation took place maybe due to rain or dew rinsing it away.

2. It was thought unimportant.

3. Premeditated exclusion.

4. The report was untrue.

The installation at Kapustin Yar although military seems to be rocket and missile orientated with no mention of chemical or biological weapons, it is an intriguing place though here is an extract from the wiki entry :

Five atmospheric nuclear tests of small power (10-40 kt) were performed over the site in 1957-1961 [1]. With the further growth and development, the site became a cosmodrome, serving in this function since 1966 (with interruption in 1988-1998). The town of Znamensk was established to support the scientists working on the facilities, their families, and supporting personnel. Initially this was a secret city, not to be found on maps and inaccessible to outsiders.

And just to add a little more mystery :

Kapustin Yar is also the site of numerous Soviet-era UFO sightings and has been called "Russia's Roswell"

Wiki link

I would posit that pasteurella was probably the cause of death but this is normally associated with a breakdown of the immune system so was the pasteurella just a symptom and not the cause should they have been looking at components that pressure the immune system instead of closing the case where they did.

The incidents proximity to Kapustin Yar does raise questions and the potential is there to contaminate the surrounding area with fallout from launches or support operations but without in depth forensic investigations the true answer may never be known.

The biological weapons facilities dealt with in your link do not appear to be close enough to have been a factor and since the collapse of the Soviet Union have been inactive or abandoned in their original work, thank goodness I say.

reply to post by UberL33t


3200?!?......yeah, back in May but now apparently the numbers went up to 12.000 as of June 1st!!!

At least 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes (Saiga tatarica) have been found dead in Kazakhstan in the past two weeks, victims of a mysterious epidemic. The deaths represent about 15 percent of the species' worldwide population.

So what caused the outbreak? According to tests by the Kazakh government, the antelopes died of pasteurellosis, an infection that afflicts the lungs. According to a release by the IUCN, "Pasteurellosis is caused by a bacterium that lives naturally in healthy individuals, but can cause acute illness and rapid death if the animal's immune system is compromised, either by another infection, poisoning, stress or malnutrition."
Olga Pereladova, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Central Asia Program, told the Daily Telegraph that the animals might have been malnourished following an unusually cold winter and by an overly hot spring, which may have contributed to the spread of the disease.
Serik Imanukulov, a Kazakh official who heads the department of sanitary and epidemiology in the area, told the AFP news service that the infection may have now passed, and predicts that no more deaths will occur. "We can say the outbreak of the infection has passed and come to a close," Imanukulov said. "I do not think there will be new cases of mass deaths among the saiga at present."
A spokesperson for the Kazakh Emergencies Ministry told the Telegraph that the dead saiga are being burned to prevent further spread of the disease.

Scientific American

It seems like a plausible explanation....

Peace

reply to post by sherpa


Ohhhhh nice find. There´s some really interesting info there, im gonna dive deep into the russien area 51 in the next few days,, thx for this information.

After reading this thread, it appears that some local farmers were angry the Gov't wasn't helping them protect their crops from local herds of antelopes, so they somehow got money together, went to the local military chemical weapons facility, paid off the right people, and they proceeded to wipe out the herd with poisonous gas.

That's my conspiracy theory, and I'm sticking to it.

So this didn't "just" start, this can either give precedence to the "this has always been happening" defense... it could as well...give precedence to "this has been happening for longer and we just haven't noticed the trend until just recently". Either way, I just wanted to give this a fresh trip through the Recent Posts as it relates to current events.