Quagga - Quagga Hybrids and Similar Animals

Quagga Hybrids and Similar Animals

Zebras have been crossbred to other equines such as donkeys and horses. There are modern animal farms which continue to do so. The offspring with donkeys are known as zeedonks or zonkeys and offspring of horses are called zorses; the term for any zebra hybrid is zebroid. Zebroids are often exhibited as curiosities, although some are broken to harness or as riding animals.

There is a record of a quagga bred to a horse in the 1896 work Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle:

In the year 1815 Lord Morton put a male quagga to a young chestnut mare of seven-eighths Arabian blood, which had never before been bred from. The result was a female hybrid which resembled both parents.

In his 1859 The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin recalls seeing coloured drawings of zebra-donkey hybrids, and mentions "Lord Moreton's famous hybrid from a chesnut mare and male quagga..." Darwin mentioned this particular hybrid again in 1868 in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, and provides a citation to the journal in which Lord Morton first described the breeding.

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