Conspiracy theories

We found a lovely family to stay with in Karaoba. So we decided to stay a couple of days and interview the teachers, children and elders of the village.

It’s a really small place with only about 200 people living here, two shops and not much else, the children play out on the street though as it’s totally safe – not many people here have cars.

Carlyn tells me that this is the poorest of the villages we have been to so far, with the majority of the villagers being unemployed. Azhibay was the wealthiest according to her research so far, they have some nice jeeps there. This may be due to the fact that most people in other villages seem to think that Azhibay harbours several poachers and informants to poachers. Poaching is considered easy money despite the fines and imprisonment facing those found guilty. However, as the police have such old vehicles they are no match for the modern ones that the poachers seem to have.

Additionally, while villages have a good idea of who is to blame they say they are too scared to tell the police as they feel that often some of police are in the pay of the poachers anyway.

Borsoy seems to be the village of conspiracy theories; Carlyn’s interviews with the villagers here have been interesting to say the least!

Borsoy is one of the villages very close to the site of the 2010 mass saiga death and was again impacted by the die-off of 500 last month.

The official scientific verdict on the deaths attributes them both to pasteurellosis, the underlying trigger for the latest outbreak seems to point to poisoned grasses. However, several of the villagers are contesting that this is the cause and propose that as none their own cattle died during either event that poachers are to blame, poisoning the herd in order to cut off their horns once they had died.

Villagers state that the majority of the 12,000 saiga which died in 2010 were males and not in fact females and calves. They state that they saw this first hand as many of them went out to help collect and bury the bodies. They say that a combination of poachers and villages cut off the horns of the male saiga before they were buried, which made it look as though they were mainly females!

And of course, interviews with the children threw up some interesting stories; notably, when asked if he’d ever seen a saiga, one little boy replied that his father regularly bought dead ones home!

Of course there are no photos to prove any of this but the locals here all seem to have their own conflicting theories.