How Many Gazelles Are Left in the World?

There is no single number for how many gazelles remain in the world, because “gazelle” is not one animal. The word covers roughly a dozen and a half species scattered across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and their fortunes vary wildly. A few species still number in the hundreds of thousands. Others have been reduced to scattered groups of a few hundred or fewer. At least one, the Saudi gazelle, is already gone. The total across all species likely falls somewhere in the low millions, but that aggregate figure hides a grimmer reality for many individual species, some of which teeter on the edge of disappearing entirely.

Why a Single Number Does Not Exist

Gazelles belong to several related genera within the family Bovidae, and taxonomists have debated the boundaries for decades. The genus Gazella alone contains roughly nine recognized species, with common ancestors that diversified during the late Miocene through the Pleistocene, between roughly seven and two million years ago.¹ Add in species from the genera Nanger (which includes the dama gazelle and Grant’s gazelle), Eudorcas (Thomson’s gazelle), and Procapra (Mongolian and Przewalski’s gazelles), and you are looking at somewhere around 16 to 19 species that commonly carry the name “gazelle,” depending on who is drawing the lines. Each lives in a different habitat, faces different threats, and is counted by different methods with different margins of error. No global registry tallies them all in one place.

This matters because the health of gazelles as a group is easily misread. Tourists visiting the Serengeti see Thomson’s gazelles by the thousands and assume everything is fine. Conservationists working in the Sahel know that their species are vanishing. Both perspectives are correct, and both are incomplete.

The More Abundant Species

Thomson’s gazelle is probably the most familiar species, the small, dark-striped antelope that appears in every wildlife documentary about the African savanna. It remains relatively numerous, with current estimates generally placed in the range of several hundred thousand animals across East Africa. That said, “relatively numerous” does not mean stable. Census data from the Serengeti showed that the population dropped by almost two thirds over a 13-year period, from about 660,000 in the early 1970s to fewer than 250,000 by 1985, with predation identified as one factor that could prevent recovery.² A separate analysis covering 1978 through 1986 found no change in gazelle numbers during that window, complicating the picture and suggesting that the decline may have slowed or stabilized for a time.³ More recent counts suggest some recovery, but the species’ long-term trajectory is still debated among ecologists.

The springbok, southern Africa’s iconic leaping antelope, numbers in the hundreds of thousands and is not considered threatened. Grant’s gazelle in East Africa is also comparatively well off, though less abundant than Thomson’s. The dorcas gazelle, a small species spread across the Sahara and into the Middle East, is harder to count because it lives in some of the most remote terrain on Earth. The goitered gazelle, found from the Arabian Peninsula through Iran and into Central Asia, still maintains sizable populations in places like Mongolia and Iran, but climate modeling predicts that suitable habitat will shrink at the northern and southern edges of its range.⁴

Species in Serious Trouble

The dama gazelle is one of the most endangered antelopes on the planet. Listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, it once ranged across the entire Sahel belt from Mauritania to Sudan. Today only a few small, highly scattered populations persist, mainly in Niger and Chad.⁵ How few? A 2005 ground survey in southern Tamesna, Mali, documented just seven gazelles sighted directly and evidence of 18 additional individuals across an area of nearly 1,800 square kilometers.⁶ More recent camera-trap work in Niger’s Aïr and Ténéré reserve detected the species at low rates and found a consistently low proportion of young animals, raising concerns about whether enough calves are surviving to sustain the population.⁵ Estimates of the total wild population vary, but most conservationists place it somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred.

The mountain gazelle, found in Israel, Palestine, and parts of the Levant, is classified as Endangered. Illegal hunting remains a serious problem. Despite laws banning gazelle hunting in Israel, researchers estimate that between 300 and 1,300 mountain gazelles are poached there every year, using firearms, off-road vehicles, trained dogs, foot traps, and night-vision equipment.⁷ For a species whose total population in Israel is thought to be in the low thousands, that level of poaching is devastating.

The Arabian gazelle, a close relative of the mountain gazelle, faces a different but equally bleak combination of threats. Analysis of long-term population data from Israel found that wolf predation and rising maximum temperatures were the strongest predictors of fawn survival, suggesting that climate change is compounding the pressure from predators.⁸

Cuvier’s gazelle, the only gazelle adapted to mountainous terrain in North Africa, is classified as Vulnerable. It has been confirmed in rugged areas of Morocco’s Central High Atlas, where it is threatened by overhunting and habitat destruction.⁹ Distribution modeling shows that the species gravitates toward complex networks of hills and ravines far from human settlements, places where terrain provides shelter from both predators and poachers, and where conditions buffer against the extreme Saharan climate.¹⁰ Its reliance on these remote pockets makes it difficult to count and even more difficult to protect.

A Species Already Lost

The Saudi gazelle once lived across the Arabian Peninsula and was considered a distinct species. By the late twentieth century, unregulated hunting and habitat loss had wiped it out in the wild. Hope lingered that some individuals might survive in private collections, but genetic analysis of captive gazelles in Saudi Arabia found no evidence that any living animals belonged to the species. The Saudi gazelle appears to be genuinely extinct.¹¹ Its story is a cautionary example of how quickly a gazelle species can be lost when hunting is unchecked and populations are small.

Desert Survival and Its Limits

Several gazelle species have remarkable physiological adaptations to arid environments. The dorcas gazelle, for instance, has a daily water turnover rate of only about 6 percent of its body mass, comparable to a camel. When it can access moisture-rich vegetation, the water it extracts can exceed its daily needs and remove the need to drink at all.¹² That is a striking adaptation, but it has limits. When vegetation dries out completely, dorcas gazelles stop eating and become moribund after only a few days without water, unlike camels and goats, which can tolerate much greater dehydration and continue grazing on dry roughage.¹² Habitat surveys in Niger’s Tin Toumma desert found that dorcas gazelles were strongly associated with increases in vegetation productivity, meaning that droughts hit them hard even in landscapes they have occupied for millennia.¹³

These adaptations explain why gazelles can live where most large mammals cannot, but they also highlight a vulnerability. As temperatures rise and dry seasons lengthen, the margin of survival for desert-adapted gazelles shrinks. A species that already operates at the physiological edge of water balance does not have much room to absorb additional stress.

Fragmented Populations and Genetic Isolation

Even where gazelle numbers look adequate on paper, fragmentation can undermine long-term viability. Mongolian gazelles, which still form large herds on the eastern steppe, show measurable genetic differences between populations separated by landscape barriers. One study comparing two populations found that the more isolated group had lower genetic diversity and a distinct genetic structure compared to the less-isolated one.¹⁴ In Central Iran, goitered gazelle populations also showed restricted gene flow, with a combination of geographic distance, landscape features like mountains and deserts, and human-made barriers shaping their genetic structure. Researchers concluded that some isolated populations should be treated as separate management units for conservation purposes.¹⁵

Fragmentation matters because small, isolated populations lose genetic diversity over generations, becoming more vulnerable to disease, inbreeding, and environmental shocks. For a species like the goitered gazelle, which still has reasonable total numbers, fragmentation is the threat that is easiest to overlook and hardest to reverse once established.

Captive Breeding and Reintroduction

For the most endangered species, captive breeding may be the only path back from the brink. The Cuvier’s gazelle offers one of the more encouraging case studies. A European captive breeding program that began in 1975 with just four founding individuals eventually grew large enough to supply animals for a reintroduction effort in Tunisia, launched in 2016. Forty-three captive-bred gazelles were transported to acclimatization pens and gradually released. Over the following three years, all demographic measures improved: birth rates went up, juvenile mortality went down, and the reintroduced population’s performance was statistically indistinguishable from the source captive population.¹⁶

Whole-genome analysis of the breeding program’s animals found no significant loss of genetic diversity between the founder generation and their offspring, and no increase in problematic inbreeding. That was a reassuring finding, since four founders is an extremely narrow genetic base, and it suggested the program could serve as a source for future reintroductions elsewhere in the species’ historical range.¹⁷

Reintroduction is not always so smooth, however. Mountain gazelles released into Saudi Arabia’s Ibex Reserve experienced population declines at both reintroduction sites. Food availability and population density emerged as the strongest predictors of home range size, and limited food appeared to increase competition among females, driving dispersal and preventing the population from stabilizing.¹⁸ The lesson: releasing animals into habitat that looks suitable on a map is not enough if the food resources cannot support a growing population.

The Problem with Fences, Roads, and Borders

Many gazelle species are nomadic, following rain and vegetation across vast distances. That lifestyle collides with modern infrastructure. GPS tracking of Mongolian gazelles showed that the animals avoided disturbed areas like oil fields but did not especially seek out protected areas, and no single protected area in the region was large enough to contain the annual range of any tracked individual.¹⁹ Fences along international borders, highways, and railroads all fragment the landscape, and because nomadic species do not use predictable corridors, the conventional approach of designating narrow wildlife corridors does not work for them. Instead, researchers have argued that the entire landscape needs to remain permeable to long-distance movement.¹⁹

This is a genuinely difficult conservation challenge. Gazelle ranges often cross national borders, and the political will to coordinate land-use planning across countries for the benefit of a nomadic antelope is rarely a high priority. In Central Asia, border fences between Mongolia, China, and Russia have already disrupted gazelle movements. In the Sahel, political instability in Mali, Niger, and Chad makes even basic wildlife monitoring dangerous, let alone transboundary management plans.

Disease Spillover from Livestock

Gazelles and domestic livestock share grazing land across much of the species’ range, and that overlap creates disease risks. Surveillance on Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe found evidence of foot-and-mouth disease virus exposure in Mongolian gazelles, but only during or following concurrent outbreaks in livestock. The pattern suggested that the virus spills over from cattle and sheep into the wild gazelle population, rather than circulating independently among the gazelles themselves. Controlling the disease, then, depends on vaccinating livestock rather than trying to manage wild herds.²⁰

Foot-and-mouth disease is not the only concern. Across the Middle East and North Africa, livestock encroachment into gazelle habitat brings risks of other infections as well as direct competition for food and water. For species already reduced to small populations, even a single disease outbreak can be catastrophic.

How Gazelles Are Counted

Getting accurate population estimates for gazelles is harder than it sounds. Traditional methods involve aerial surveys and ground transects, both of which are expensive, logistically demanding, and limited to areas where you can safely fly a plane or drive a vehicle. In places like Niger’s Aïr and Ténéré reserve, researchers have supplemented direct observation with camera traps and indirect evidence like tracks and droppings, calculating abundance indices rather than absolute counts.⁵

Newer technologies are beginning to help. Drone-based monitoring with automated tracking algorithms has been tested on Przewalski’s gazelles in China, where a multi-target tracking system improved on standard methods and showed promise as a tool for monitoring individual animals from the air.²¹ Drones can cover terrain that is inaccessible or dangerous for ground teams, and automated image analysis could eventually make large-scale surveys faster and cheaper. For now, though, population estimates for most gazelle species remain rough, and the species living in the most remote or politically unstable regions are the least well counted, which usually means they are the ones we should be most worried about.