Critically Endangered
African wild ass
Equus africanus
The African wild ass or African wild donkey, is a wild member of the horse family, Equidae.
Appearance
The short, smooth coat is a light grey to fawn colour, fading quickly to white on the undersides and legs. There is a slender, dark dorsal stripe in all subspecies, while in the Nubian wild ass (E. A. Africanus), as well as the domestic donkey, there is a stripe across the shoulder.
The African wild ass is about 1.2 metres (4 ft) tall and weighs approximately 250 kilograms (600 lb).
Range and habitat
African wild asses are found in desert or semidesert environments. It formerly had a wider range north and west into Sudan, Egypt, and Libya.
A protected population of the Somali wild ass exists in the Yotvata Hai-Bar Nature Reserve in Israel, to the north of Eilat. This reserve was established in 1968 with the view to bolster populations of endangered desert species.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
In the wild, African wild ass breeding occurs during the wet season.
In crisis
It is critically endangered, with about 570 existing in the wild. Even though the species itself is under no threat of extinction, due to abundant domestic stock (donkeys and burros), the two extant wild subspecies are both listed as critically endangered. African wild asses have been captured for domestication for centuries and this, along with interbreeding between wild and domestic animals, has caused a distinct decline in population numbers.
There are now only a few hundred individuals left in the wild. Competition with domestic livestock for grazing, and restricted access to water supplies caused by agricultural developments, pose further threats to the survival of this species.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
African wild ass is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on African wild ass, Wikidata item Q208140. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
