Chapter 1 Equus quagga and Lord Morton’s mare
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The right honourable George Douglas, FRS, 16th Earl of Morton, was perplexed; in 1820, he had sold a chestnut-brown mare to his friend, Sir Gore Ouseley, who had crossed her with `a very fine black Arabian horse’. Both Morton and Ouseley were astonished by the offspring of this union, two foals who were clearly Arabian horses, but ‘both in their colour, and in the lir of their manes, they have a striking resemblance to the qu2gga’.1 Quaggas were a kind of zebra, but it was mainly their heads and shoulders that were striped. They belong to a small, sad club whose members include the passenger pigeon and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger) of animals for whom we know the exact day au which they became extinct. The last quagga died in Amsterdam zoo on 12 August 1883. At the time, the species went =mourned, as no one realized she was the last one. Why should the offspring of Ouseley’s animals look like 7 .-,aggas, when both parents were horses? Morton had a theory. A w years earlier, he had owned a male quagga which he had loped to domesticate. But like the other zebras, quaggas are ctically untameable — bad-tempered and stubborn, zebras not bite, they refuse to let go — even today, more zookeepers are lured by zebras than by lions or tigers. The indigenous people of Sr_auth Africa had never managed to ride them and thus £Jropeans were not met by troops of African cavalry when they riarted their encroachments. (The history of Africa might have
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