A brush with the saola

If there’s a common wisdom to field biology, it is to expect the unexpected. And the last thing primatologist Nancy Ruggeri expected to encounter was the saola.

But there it was, the spindle-horned animal that is possibly the last of the world’s large mammals to be discovered. And it was not in some Southeast Asian mountain forest, the animal’s natural setting, where Ruggeri saw and photographed the saola. It was in a dingy menagerie in a dusty frontier town in Laos, the curiosity of a local official.

The saola was cataloged for Western science for the first time in 1993 by Vietnamese scientists. The description was based on a captured juvenile. To that time, it had escaped notice by the many bands of intrepid field scientists dispatched from the West over the past 150 years – especially the great expeditions of the 19th century – to find and describe all the animals and birds of the world.

“The saola is probably the last large mammal in the world to be described,” says Ruggeri, a zoology assistant faculty associate. “That’s what’s so incredible about it. It was completely overlooked.”

Ruggeri’s pictures are the first of a live adult saola, an animal that looks very much like an antelope, but whose precise taxonomic classification is still murky. Ruggeri may have been the first Western scientist to see an adult animal.

The size of a sheep, short and stocky, and the color of chocolate, the saola’s two-foot-long horns are reminiscent of the spindle on a spinning wheel. With distinctive white facial marks and white bands across its rump, the animal, says Ruggeri, is unmistakable. It stayed hidden for so long because it exists in a limited and very remote area of Laos and Vietnam – countries until recently closed to the West – where it is thought to inhabit the wet forests of the Annamite Mountains.

Although very rare – with guesses of population ranging from 200 to 2,000 – the saola is not unknown to the Hmong tribes of the region who hunt the antelope-like animal with the help of dogs. And that, Ruggeri says, is how the saola she encountered in early January, 1996, came to be in the menagerie of a powerful Lao official.

Working on a field study of gibbons near the frontier town of Lak Sao, Ruggeri heard with disbelief rumors that a saola had been captured and sold to the local official for his private zoo.

“When I heard about it, I was very skeptical – until I got there,” says Ruggeri of entering Lak Sao, a town that is little more than a dusty spot in the road, a frontier outpost whose primary authority is the local general or warlord.

Ruggeri took pictures of the female saola, which lived for only 18 days in captivity. No one, she says, knew how to care for it, although attempts were made and a veterinarian was dispatched by the Wildlife Conservation Society in an effort to save it. The Hmong did, however, make an uncanny – and accurate – prediction that the animal was pregnant.

Although the region of Laos where Ruggeri was working on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society is remote and teems with exotic wildlife – tigers, gibbons, macaques and other rare primates – the prospects for the saola are probably not very good, she says.

With such a small population and with new pressures from logging and other forms of development, the saola will, at best, remain a rarely encountered animal.