Reintroducing one species to save other makes us marvel as the interconnectedness that nature can be.

Three kids, a cat and a dog. This photograph could be like any family from Des Moines, Hamburg, or Christchurch, but this family is Mongolian. Mongolian nomads have had a long history of keeping Livestock Guardian Dogs (LGDs) to protect their stock, but over the last century, Mongolia became more industrialized under the Soviet regime, and the Bankhar, a huge shaggy dog that evolved to withstand the region’s brutal winters, plummeted in numbers.  Mongolian herders now risked losing stock to native predators, and to protect the livelihood that helped them survive, they sometimes had little option but to shoot these animals. The end result was that the snow leopard, wolf and eagle population in Mongolia became severely threatened.

In response, the Mongolian Bankhar Dog Project was founded by Bruce Elfstrom, an American biologist. The Project addressed this ecological crisis by re-introducing Bankhars to families that lost the tradition of using LGDs. It’s a win/win solution that has had an 80 to 100% success rate. Meet one herder and his dogs in the video below: