The animal that arrived at Hannah Huckabay’s barn this past summer had been advertised as a mule, but it didn’t look like any mule she’d ever seen. She had bought it cheaply online from a livestock auction with thoughts of reselling it or putting it up for adoption, as she does with many last-chance equines at her stables in Aurora, Colorado.

It had a broom-bristle mane and a wedge-shaped head, an equine silhouette more often found in a cave painting than on a ranch. “I looked at him, with my daughters, and we thought, ‘Is he a Przewalski’s?’ Or however you say it?” Huckabay later said. “But that seemed very impossible; those horses are critically endangered.”

It couldn’t be, could it? The Przewalski’s — most commonly pronounced che-VAL-ski’s — is so rare that the horse, native to Mongolia, was once extinct in the wild. Its scant bloodlines are tracked by zoos, and individual animals are part of multinational conservation efforts. These precious few horses don’t typically knock around auctions in the western United States.

“POV,” one of her daughters wrote on a TikTok video. “You accidentally rescue a purebred Przewalski.”

But the seemingly impossible had actually happened twice: Soon after, Huckabay’s daughters found a TikTok post by a woman from Utah named Kelsey Bjorklund. She had taken in an identical animal after it was given up by an auction buyer.

Why had these endangered creatures been passed around and sold as cheap horseflesh?

“You think all the money and all the resources they spend to try and breed these animals so they are not extinct and no longer critically endangered, and now you’ve got people just throwing them away,” Huckabay said. “It shouldn’t have happened to begin with.”

In a way, though, it might be a good sign for the species.

Endangered horses sold on the cheap

The Przewalski’s, or Takhi, was once endemic to the grasslands of Central Asia — until the herds were entirely wiped out, including by Victorian-era hunters and people seeking an exotic foal, or baby horse, as a souvenir. Many scientists believe it is the only true wild horse, never domesticated. By the 1960s, the worldwide population had dwindled to about a dozen zoo animals.

But the horses also represent a remarkable conservation story. A breeding initiative led by the Prague Zoo has helped their numbers rebound to 2,000 worldwide. A consortium of zoos has engineered the reintroduction of Przewalski’s back to their native steppe, where they once more run free. Just this past summer, Czech military planes flew a handful of carefully selected Przewalski’s from the Tierpark zoo in Berlin to Kazakhstan as part of a global mission to reintroduce the species to that country for the first time since they went extinct in the wild.

A few Przewalski’s are in private hands around the world, but owners must have special permits, issued by state wildlife agencies or departments of environmental conservation, to keep or trade them. And the horses are categorically not supposed to end up where the TikTok Takhis did: in what is known as the equine slaughter pipeline, where they stood a chance of being sold and shipped to Canada and Mexico for butchering for things like dog food and glue.

“This is something we have never encountered before. It is very heartbreaking,” said Amanda Faliano, the keeper of the Przewalski’s horse studbook for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan, which tracks the lineage and status of each Takhi in North America and who consulted on the case of the horses in the West. The Utah and Colorado horses recently underwent genetic testing by Texas A&M University that indicated that they are indeed Przewalski’s.

Huckabay, 58, and her four children live on a 10-acre ranch in Aurora, just outside Denver, where Huckabay has kept horses for more than two decades. She often buys unwanted horses from auctions known as “kill pens” with plans to rehabilitate, train and resell or rehome them. Huckabay said she does this at a loss to rescue animals, but many people earn money from pulling animals from the so-called slaughter pipeline, which sends between 20,000 to 25,000 unwanted horses to be rendered in Canada and Mexico a year, according to data collected by the American Horse Council.

To tell the story of the TikTok Takhis, I tracked their journey across three states, talking to horse buyers and sellers and a slew of cowboys (including one named Rooster) and unearthing an unusual incident report filed by a conscientious deputy.

It all started in February, when Huckabay paid $1,375 for the animal she saw advertised online. Utah agriculture officials had issued a brand inspection identifying it as a mule, which is a cross between a horse and a donkey. But with faint zebra striping on his legs and a rough-hewed muzzle, he immediately stood out as … something else.

Huckabay’s daughters named him Shrek, and he was as wild as all get out. “If you get too close to his face, he’ll knock the daylights out of you,” she said.

She bought Shrek from the Smith Horse Co. in Peabody, Kansas, a horse reseller that also puts on rodeos. Its owner, Jeff Smith, said he didn’t know what kind of horse it was when he bought the funny-looking creature for $700 from a horse dealer in Utah named Curt Anderson, who sources animals for resellers like Smith.

Anderson said he found the horse at a livestock auction in Willard, Utah, just east of the Great Salt Lake. He didn’t know what it was, either. The only person who had a hunch was Anderson’s 13-year-son, Cannon, who was looking at photos of horses on his phone as they drove out of the Willard auction.

“He said, ‘That looks like one of them Prz-whatevers,’” Anderson recalled. But the father dismissed it as impossible.

“I kind of feel lucky I bought a horse like that. I would have felt luckier if I had kept him myself,” he said.

The Willard auction is owned by Jeff Anderson, who is not related to Curt Anderson. He said the horse had been consigned to him by a cowboy everyone knows as Rooster.

Rooster’s real name is Kasey Bartlett. He said he had bought the horse at another auction in Cedar City, in south-central Utah. A frequent customer there, he had seen the animal pass through several times, only to be returned every time because he could not be trained. When the price dropped to just $90, Bartlett took a risk and bid.

Bartlett could barely get him on the truck to ship him home. “He was wild and mean and disrespectful,” he said. “I figured maybe somebody would want him because you don’t see something like that everyday.”

Except lately, he had. Bartlett had noted something else passing repeatedly through the Cedar City auction: a nearly identical mare.

A clue in a crooked ear

On June 9, Kelsey Bjorklund posted a TikTok video of the strange looking mare that turned up at her barn. “Did we just have a Przewalski mare surrendered?!”

Bjorklund, 32, runs the Lazy B Equine Rescue and Sanctuary, in Clinton, Utah, a nonprofit where she and her husband, Gunnar, and their three children give refuge to unwanted horses. She had taken in the mare after a woman surrendered her, saying that the animal was untamable. Kelsey Bjorklund would not identify that person, citing Lazy B’s privacy policies.

But she said the woman had bought the mare from the Cedar City auction for $35.

This animal, too, had been classified by Utah officials as a mule. (The Bjorklunds named her Fiona after they found out about Shrek.) Caroline Hargraves, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food’s Brand Inspection Board, said the inspectors rely on information the original owner provides.

“The brand inspection program does not receive training on endangered species and is not tasked with policing activity regarding endangered species,” Hargraves said in an email.

Kelsey Bjorklund noticed something about the animal right away: It had a crooked ear. A familiar one.

Two years earlier, Bjorklund said, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office had called her up in a pickle: Four utterly wild mules were running amok in a hayfield in the town of Palmyra. One mare had a crooked ear. “They appeared to look more like Zebras than mules,” Deputy Kyler Gilstrap wrote in the incident report.

I reached out to the Utah Sheriff’s Office, where Gilstrap is known for finding lost horses, including a herd of six missing colts he hunted down with a helicopter in 2023, long after their owner had given up the search. He was on leave when I called him, but the office sent me his police report.

In it, he said some detective work led him to a woman named Beverly Davis. She told him the animals were Przewalski’s that had been purchased at a Missouri exotic animal auction more than a decade ago by her husband, who had since died. Gilstrap wrote that she agreed to surrender them to the sheriff’s office. After fruitlessly calling several zoos and rescues like Lazy B, Gilstrap wrote, he found a cowboy named Ole Lindgren willing to accept them. (By then, there were only three. One elderly animal died after the roundup.)

Known as the cowboy guru, Lindgren once described himself on his now-defunct website as “just a little bit ‘off.’” He gave the novelty animals pasture on his ranch in Antimony, Utah, he said in an interview. But the horses kept smashing through his fences and menacing his ranch hands.

“They’re wilder than any mustang,” he said.

So when Lindgren was approached last year by a man who said he could get the horses into a zoo, he asked no questions — not even the man’s name, he said. Plus, it seemed to him that the endangered creatures were going to waste.

“Are you going to feed them in some ignominious pasture where no one is going to see them and care?” Lindgren said. He said he did not know they ended up in the auction in Cedar City.

Finding a herd

So where did Shrek and Fiona come from? Christian Kern, the zoological director at Berlin’s Tierpark, shared his theory with me last summer as we wandered amid the zoo’s herd of Takhis.

Kern said the international Przewalski’s breeding program carefully manages the bloodlines of the original dozen horses, to best bolster the breed. But, he said, a small number of animals born in zoos are released into private hands because they are not genetically useful to that population. If those animals had babies, they might never be recorded in a studbook.

And now, the silver lining in the horses’ saga: The very existence of surplus animals like Shrek and Fiona can be seen as a sign that the conservation effort has, against all odds, worked. The herd, which once numbered only 12 on the planet, is now perhaps robust enough that not every animal must be closely tracked.

When we spoke, Kern had just returned from Kazakhstan, where he had accompanied four Przewalski’s bred in Prague and Berlin aboard a Czech military plane and released them into the Altyn Dala steppe, the first to set hoof there since they were made extinct.

“We are not keeping them for ourselves here,” Kern said as an endangered foal nursed from its mother just beside him in Berlin. “We are here to give them back.”

On Oct. 12, Fiona took ill with colic and what appeared to be organ failure. Realizing she was likely in her 20s, the Bjorklunds decided to euthanize her. They loaded her body into a trailer and took her to Utah State University, where veterinary students will study her bones to learn about these rare wild horses.

“They were lost. They were forgotten. Nobody wanted them,” Gunnar Bjorklund said of the Przewalski’s the week of Fiona’s death. “But her last few days, she was being a horse, with a mini donkey and a mini mule, and they were living their best life. She was with a herd.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.