Dama Gazelle
The dama gazelle is the largest of all gazelle species, standing out for its long neck washed in reddish brown and its strikingly white body and legs. Both sexes carry ringed horns shaped like a stretched S, and those of the males are longer and thicker. This gazelle, also called the addra gazelle in the east and the mhorr gazelle in the west, once roamed a broad belt from the Atlantic coast of Senegal and Mauritania to the Nile in Sudan. Mechanized hunting, overgrazing by livestock and the cutting of the trees it feeds on have reduced it to a few small, scattered groups in Chad and Niger. It browses on acacia leaves, shoots and pods, eats grasses and desert herbs, and can go a long time without drinking. Groups are small today, although large herds were once common. With fewer than 80 adults left in the wild according to the IUCN, the dama gazelle ranks among the rarest large mammals on Earth, and breeding programs in zoos and in Chad are now critical to its survival.
What is the dama gazelle? Addra, mhorr and dama
The dama gazelle (Nanger dama) is a large gazelle of the Sahel and the edges of the Sahara, first described by the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1766. It belongs to the genus Nanger, together with Grant's and Soemmerring's gazelles, and you may still see it under its older scientific name, Gazella dama. The name dama comes from Latin, where it was a word for deer and similar animals. The species is known by several common names, and they are often searched as if they were different animals. Addra gazelle is the name used for the eastern form, from Chad and Sudan, which is mostly white with a reddish neck and a small saddle on the back. Mhorr gazelle, or mohor in Spanish, names the western form of Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania, with much more reddish brown on the back and flanks. It went extinct in the wild around 1968, and the mhorr gazelles alive today descend from a small group rescued in the early 1970s and bred in Almería, Spain. Between the two lived the nominate dama form. Genetic studies have shown that the color changes gradually from west to east, and the 2025 IUCN assessment no longer treats the three as valid subspecies. In Hausa it is called meyna or ménas.
Where does the dama gazelle live?
The dama gazelle once lived across the whole Sahel, from the Atlantic coast to the Nile, and in the dry steppes on the northern side of the Sahara. Today the IUCN lists it as surviving in only two countries, Chad and Niger, and it is gone from Algeria, Cameroon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, Sudan and Western Sahara. In Mali it may still survive, but there are no recent records. In Chad the main group lives in the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a huge protected area in the center of the country, and a few animals remain in the Manga region in the west. In Niger the last known group lives in the Termit and Tin Toumma National Nature Reserve, partly around the Termit massif, a rocky range where the gazelles find refuge. The species lives in open savanna, shrubland and desert, between sea level and about 1,000 meters, and prefers sandy plains and wide valleys with scattered acacias. It is nomadic: in the past, herds moved north into the Sahara during the short rainy season, when fresh plants appeared, and returned south to the Sahel as the land dried out. These long movements are one reason the gazelle needs large, open landscapes without fences or busy settlements.
How big is the dama gazelle? Size, colors and horns
The dama gazelle is the largest gazelle in the world. It stands about 90 to 120 centimeters at the shoulder, measures 140 to 165 centimeters from nose to rump and has a tail of 25 to 35 centimeters, long for a gazelle. Weight ranges from 35 to 75 kilograms: females usually weigh 35 to 40 kilograms, while males can reach 75. Its long legs and neck give it a tall, upright shape, and the extra skin surface also helps it lose heat in the desert. The head and neck are reddish brown, the face and body are mostly white, and there is a white patch on the throat. How much reddish brown covers the back and flanks depends on where the animal comes from: western gazelles, known as mhorr, are reddish over most of the back and flanks, while eastern ones, the addra, keep the color mostly on the neck and a narrow band on the back. Both males and females have ringed horns that curve back and then forward at the tips, in the shape of a stretched S. In males they reach about 35 centimeters, and in females they are much shorter and thinner. Young gazelles are paler and their color darkens as they grow.
What does the dama gazelle eat?
Food and water are both scarce across the dama gazelle's range, and the species is well suited to that life. It both browses and grazes. Much of its diet comes from trees and shrubs, above all the leaves, shoots, pods and fruit of acacias, and it also eats grasses, desert herbs and the leaves of low bushes. Its long neck lets it reach branches that smaller gazelles cannot, and it often stands on its hind legs to pull down leaves that are even higher. It gets a good part of the water it needs from the plants it eats and can survive fairly long droughts, although it needs more water than some of its desert relatives, such as the addax. During the short rainy season it takes advantage of fresh green growth to build up its body condition before the long dry months. Its dependence on trees is also part of its problem: in many parts of the Sahel, herders cut acacia branches to feed their goats and camels, and this leaves less food for the gazelles. Overgrazing by livestock also removes the grasses and herbs that the gazelles depend on in the dry season, when there is very little else to eat.
How does the dama gazelle live? Herds, territories, fawns and predators
The dama gazelle is active by day and lives in groups. In the past, family groups of 15 to 20 animals were normal, and loose herds of around 200 gathered during the seasonal movements. Today groups are usually much smaller because so few animals remain. Groups are made up of females and their young, often with a dominant male. During the breeding season, adult males hold territories and drive other mature males away, marking the ground with urine, piles of dung and a scent from glands in front of the eyes. When a gazelle spots danger, it may leap stiffly into the air with all four legs, a jump called pronking that warns the rest of the group. Females give birth to a single fawn, rarely twins, after a pregnancy of about six and a half months. For the first days the fawn stays hidden among the vegetation while the mother feeds nearby; after a few days it can follow the herd, and after a week it can run as fast as the adults. In the past its predators included cheetahs, lions, spotted hyenas and African wild dogs, most of which are now rare in its range. Jackals hunt fawns, and females have been seen chasing jackals away together.
Why is the dama gazelle critically endangered?
The IUCN lists the dama gazelle as Critically Endangered. Its latest assessment, made in 2025 and published in 2026, estimates only 45 to 78 mature individuals in the wild, in a population that is still decreasing and badly fragmented. Counting young animals, conservation groups put the total at around 100 to 150. The IUCN Green Status rates the species as Critically Depleted, at about 14 percent of what a healthy population across its old range would be. The main cause of the decline is hunting, especially from vehicles, which spread across the Sahara and the Sahel during the 20th century. Livestock competes for grass and water, herders cut the acacias the gazelles feed on, and drought, livestock diseases and years of war and unrest have made things worse. With so few animals left, a bad season or a single poaching trip can wipe out a whole group. On the positive side, 81 to 90 percent of the wild population lives inside protected areas, and there is a coordinated conservation strategy for the whole range. About 2,900 dama gazelles live in zoos, breeding centers and private reserves, a reserve population that is now used to bring the species back to places where it disappeared.
Where is the dama gazelle being reintroduced?
The most important project is in Chad's Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, the same reserve where scimitar horned oryx and addax have been brought back. The reserve still held around 50 wild dama gazelles, but they were not increasing, so in January 2020 a breeding herd was started inside a large enclosure. Its founders were three females rescued from the Manga region, more wild animals from Manga and the reserve, and five gazelles bred at the Deleika center of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi. The herd grew to 29, and in 2024 six gazelles fitted with satellite collars were released into the reserve; one of them was soon seen joining a group of wild dama. At the end of 2024 the breeding herd had 32 animals, with genes from both Manga and Abu Dhabi. The partners include Sahara Conservation, the Smithsonian and the Zoological Society of London. Further west, mhorr gazelles bred in Spain have been released into fenced reserves in Senegal, such as Guembeul, and in Morocco, where 24 went into a semi enclosed area of the Safia reserve in 2015. Poachers and dogs killed several of them, and the IUCN still counts the species as extinct in both countries because none of these groups lives freely in the wild.
