Amazing zebra quagga. Quagga - horses, myths, mythical creatures, medicinal plants Extinct zebra

Quagga(lat. Equus quagga quagga) - an exterminated equine animal, previously considered a separate species of zebra; according to modern research - a subspecies of Burchell's zebra - Equus quagga quagga. The quaggs lived in South Africa. In front they had a striped color, like a zebra, in the back - a bay color of a horse, a body length of 180 cm. Boers exterminated quaggs for their strong skins. Quagga is perhaps the only extinct animal whose representatives were tamed by humans and used to protect herds: much earlier than domestic sheep, cows, chickens, quagga noticed the approach of predators and warned the owners with a loud cry of “kuah”, from which they got their name.

The last wild quagga was killed in 1878. The last quagga in the world died at the Amsterdam Zoo in 1883.

1883. Contemporaries wrote: “That morning turned out to be foggy in Amsterdam, and a thick white veil tightly closed all the enclosures and the paths between them. The old attendant came, as usual, half an hour early. I cut branches, took fruit and meat from the cellar, chopped it finely and went to feed the animals. Behind the fog, not even the bars could be seen.
The old man was in a hurry, there was an hour left before the opening of the zoo, he did not want to feed the animals in front of strangers. It was quiet in the enclosures with ungulates. The old man unlocked the gate and immediately stumbled. There was a quagga on the brick floor. The last of all that ever existed in nature.
It was August 12, 1883.

In 1987, the Quagga Breeding Project was launched. The project was organized with the participation of experts - zoologists, breeders, veterinarians, geneticists and ecologists. 9 animals were bred by selection and placed for observation in the Etosha Park, Namibia, and in a special camp located near the town of Robertson, Cape Nature Conservancy farm Vrolijkheid.

On January 20, 2005, a representative of the third generation of the quagga was born - the stallion Henry, which is so similar to a typical quagga that some experts are sure that it is even more similar to the quagga than some museum exhibits of this animal made from natural skins. Experts are confident that the project will be successful, and soon the restored quaggs will be settled in the vast South Africa.

Do you know how much rare species disappeared due to human error? Extermination for food, skin and pleasure led to the fact that on this moment just don't count. The most beautiful creatures are destroyed irrevocably.

In today's article, we will introduce you to another unusual animal, which, unfortunately, is extinct. This is a quagga.

Appearance

Quagga is an odd-toed hoofed animal, previously considered a separate representative of the species. However, even today it has been proven that this is a subspecies of the Burchell zebra.

The wonderful animal had an unusual color: a striped head and neck, like the zebras we are used to, and a plain bay croup, like horses.

But, nevertheless, the quagga is considered a zebra due to numerous features: the shape of the head, a short stiff mane, a tail ending in a tassel, and a physique. The only difference is the coloring. Usually zebras have a completely striped body, and the quagga had stripes only in front.

Brown and white stripes were bright on the head and neck, and then they became dull, as if the artist had run out of paint. On the back and sides, the stripes completely disappeared in a brown color. And also the back was decorated with a dark wide stripe. The mane was as striped as the head and neck.

The body length of the animal was 180 cm, the height at the withers was 120 cm. The quagga lived for about 20 years.

The quagga lived in South Africa. Unfortunately, the Boers, the people who inhabited these territories, destroyed the beautiful zebras because of their skin, which had a high strength index.

Now it is hard to imagine, but once huge herds of quaggs filled the vast expanses of the South African steppe. Characteristic for them was a nomadic way of life, so they constantly moved, looking for food.

Taming and extermination

Surprisingly, the quagga zebra was a domesticated animal. People used them to protect livestock, since quaggs had one feature: before other animals, they noticed an approaching predator and screamed loudly, notifying a person about it.

But, as is most often the case, having tamed a beautiful and intelligent creature, people began to exterminate it.

Last Quagga, Amsterdam Zoo

The first reason mentioned earlier was the quagg skin.

Later, people decided that zebras took up too much space, and therefore began to use their land for farms and pastures, thus displacing animals.

But key point in the extermination of the quagga, a war began between the Europeans and the indigenous population of Africa.

In 1878, the last representative of rare zebras was killed in wild nature.

And in 1883, a quagga died of natural causes at the Amsterdam Zoo.

At the moment, quagg can also be seen, but only in the photo or in museums. One of the 4 surviving stuffed animals is in the Zoological Museum of Kazan federal university, RF.

Restoration of an unusual appearance

Of course, realizing that the species was irrevocably exterminated, the scientists decided to create a quagga.

In 1987, it was launched by the best zoologists, breeders, veterinarians and geneticists.

In South Africa, the zebras with the fewest stripes on the back of the body were selected. Thanks to these specimens, with the help of selection, 9 individuals were created, which were then placed in a special camp for further observations.

Reinhold Rau, project naturalist, and baby Henry

2005 is significant in that the stallion Henry was born - the first animal of the third generation. The baby was more like a quagga than the rest of the individuals, and even more than the exhibits in the museum.

The naturalist of the project, Rau, had no doubts about the success of the restoration. Seeing the miraculous result with Henry, he was sure that the quagga would soon be settled in the territories of the protected areas of South Africa.

But, it is worth noting that although the bred individuals look like quagg zebras, they are still genetically created animals. At the moment, they have been given the name Quagga Rau.

We all understand perfectly well that restoring nature is much more difficult than destroying it. This process is long, expensive and difficult.

Scientists all over the world and simply caring people urge you to treat every living creature more carefully, so that later you don’t have to regret what you did.

The most famous of the extinct African animals due to human fault was the quagga. Once upon a time, herds of thousands of quaggs shook the expanses of the South African steppe - the veld with thunder of hooves. The last individuals were killed around 1880...
At the first glance at the quagga, it is difficult to get rid of the impression that in front of you is a kind of hybrid of a horse, a donkey and a zebra. Stripes on the head and neck make it look like a zebra, light legs give it a resemblance to a donkey, and a solid buckwheat croup resembles a horse. However, the physique, the shape of the head, a short standing mane and a tail with a tassel at the end give out a real zebra in an animal, however, unusually colored. In the literature, information has been repeatedly cited about tame, rounded quaggs, but in general, zebras are difficult to tame. They are wild, vicious, they protect themselves from enemies with powerful teeth and more often with front than hind hooves.

1883 Contemporaries wrote: “That morning turned out to be foggy in Amsterdam, and a thick white veil tightly closed all the enclosures and the paths between them. The old attendant came, as usual, half an hour early. I cut branches, took fruit and meat from the cellar, chopped it finely and went to feed the animals. Behind the fog, not even the bars could be seen.
The old man was in a hurry, there was an hour left before the opening of the zoo, he did not want to feed the animals in front of strangers. It was quiet in the enclosures with ungulates. The old man unlocked the gate and immediately stumbled. There was a quagga on the brick floor. The last of all that ever existed in nature.
It was August 12, 1883.
And a century before...
A century before the sad event at the Amsterdam Zoo, which shocked naturalists, countless herds of ungulates grazed on the vast expanses of the South African savannas. Mysterious Africa was just opening the veil over its secrets before curious Europe. The blue antelope, the Burchell's zebra and the passenger pigeon still existed in nature. But the Steller's cow, the dodo and the aurochs were no longer on Earth.

Most Europeans got acquainted with African nature through books in which no answer was given to the question of what a “camelopardus” is, an amazing mestizo of a camel and a leopard, or a unicorn, which, however, sometimes has two or even three horns, or a water horse... The era of the giraffe, rhinoceros and hippopotamus will come later, at the end of the XVIII - early XIX centuries, when the first brave travelers penetrate the wilds of South Africa and bring home amazing, incredible stories about millions of herds of antelopes, huge elephants, lions and gorillas. And about quaggs.

In 1777, with the support of the Paris Zoological Society, Francois Levaillant, a brave and educated young man, went to South Africa. For three years he traveled around the Cape, crossed rivers, got lost in the savannahs and jungles. Levayan was attracted here by the stories of two associates of the famous captain James Cook - the Englishman William Anderson and the Swede Andreev Sparman, shocked by the nature of these places. Levian wrote five volumes of compelling tales of his adventures. Levayan was the first to bring realistic drawings of lions, cheetahs, and hyenas to Europe. He was the first to describe the fight between the secretary bird and poisonous snake, told about viverra and earthen wolf. He was the first to deliver to European scientists the skin and bones of a giraffe, the mysterious camelopardus. They were exhibited in the natural science museum in Paris, they were studied by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck himself. Levian also spoke about the quagga. Then still huge herds of these wonderful animals lived in the interfluve of the Orange and Vaal.

“There are three kinds of wild donkeys in South Africa - the zebra, the quagga, and the wild ass proper without stripes. On Capa, the quagga is known as the wild horse...” Let's forgive Levayan for inaccuracies in determining the relationship between the South African equids. In his time, slender scientific system their qualifications have not yet been established. “Undoubtedly, a zebra and a quagga are two different types, and they never graze together, but mix in herds with antelopes." Further, Levian quite rightly notes: “It was believed that the quagga was the result of mixing a zebra with a wild horse. But this was said by people who were not in Atrrik. There are no actual wild horses here.” The traveler was right in asserting that the quagga is an independent species. And who before him in Europe could freely talk about quagga without ever observing it in nature? “The quagga is much smaller than the zebra. This is a beautiful graceful animal,” Levian wrote.
The Boers, the descendants of the Dutch settlers, who came to these parts long before Levayan's trip, all, as one, thought differently. It is to them that the world "owes" irretrievable loss quagga and other animal species. The whole trouble of the quagga was that its skin was suitable for making wineskins, in which household drills stored grain. They also did not refuse her meat. Quaggs were shot by the thousands. Sometimes the animals were driven to the abyss. Hundreds of striped horses crashed against the rocks.
In 1810-1815, the famous English naturalist Burchell followed in the footsteps of Levian. He again brought to Europe information about South African animals. Among them was a quagga. But the information was already disturbing. "In the morning our hunters killed the quagga and ate it." Such entries are often found on the pages of the book.
And here is how Burchell describes the hunt for quagga by the local inhabitants of Namaqualand. The Africans took from nature exactly as much as they needed to feed the tribe - no more, this did not affect the number of animals in the least. “Many holes were dug,” I writes Burchell, “the space between them is protected by a line of thick logs, placed very often, so that neither antelopes nor wild horses could destroy this barrier. The line stretched for a mile or two. In some places there were no pillars, and there were deep pits, skillfully covered with branches and grass. When an animal fell into such a pit, the observer concludes, it could not move its head or legs: the pits narrowed downwards.
The locals called the quagg "igwaha", "idabe", "goaha" and did not confuse them with zebras. It should not be thought that among the Europeans who came to South Africa in the 17th century, there were no prudent and far-sighted people: in 1656, the Cape mountain zebra was under protection, its numbers inspired fear in the then governor of the Cape Province, Van Riebeek. And this was more than a hundred years before Carl Linnaeus described her from the skin and bones brought by travelers!
But, alas, no one guarded the quagga ... Here is a record that has come down to us from the 40s of the last century: “Soon we saw herds of quaggas and striped wildebeest, and their run could only be compared with a powerful cavalry attack or a hurricane. I roughly estimated their number at 15,000. Above this huge herd, frightened by our shooting, clouds of dust curled. These are lines from William Harris' book Hunting in South Africa. Let's add our own. Today, dust lies on 19 skins, several turtles and a single complete quagga skeleton that survived in the largest natural science museums in the world.

Meanwhile, Alfred Brehm wrote about her in his famous book "The Life of Animals", not realizing that the days of the quagga were numbered. Information about appearance the quaggas preserved in Brem's work give the most complete picture of the appearance of this animal: “her body is very well built, her head is beautiful, of medium size, her legs are strong. A short straight mane runs along the entire neck, the panicle on the tail is longer than that of other tiger horses. The main color of the skin is brown. Grayish-white stripes with a red tint pass through the head, neck and shoulders. The stripes form a triangle between the eyes and mouth. Adult males are up to two meters long, the height in the nape reaches 1.3 meters ... "
Yes, the quagga was beautiful. A few decades after the discovery, she became the property of zoological and paleontological museums, and in this respect she was "luckier" than, say, the Steller's cow: to exterminate this marine mammal it took two decades. True, a few years before complete disappearance in the Cape Province and shortly before its final extermination in the Orange Republic in 1878, quaggs were taken to Europe - to zoos. For several years, single individuals held out in captivity - until 1883. Burchell's zebra outlived its relative for a short time - the latter died in the Hamburg Zoo in 1911, a year before it was gone in nature.
As often happens in such cases, people began to figure out what benefit this or that animal could bring to them, if it stayed alive. It was the same with quaggs. They remembered that even Cuvier in 1821 proposed to domesticate zebras and, in particular, quaggs. Then neither he nor any other researcher could have known all the benefits of domesticating wild striped horses. They should not have been domesticated so that carts pulled by zebras briskly drove through the streets, as was the case in Cape Town at the end of the 18th century. And not at all because there was a postal service on zebras between the Transvaal and Salisbury. These were isolated attempts to use these animals and did not find followers.
The reason was different. The quagga was immune to the diseases that mowed down thousands of cattle imported by settlers from Europe. The carrier of these diseases - the tsetse fly - has become synonymous with evil for entire African regions, worse than the Colorado potato beetle that entered the potato fields of Europe from the New World.

Now let's talk a little. True, these are not empty dreams, for their implementation some facts appear. In 1917, a certain Major Manning, returning from the desert regions of Kaokoveld in Namibia, said that he had seen a whole herd of quaggs. Naturally, they did not believe him. Several years passed, and reports of quaggs reappeared from Kaokoveld. Optical illusion? More recently, a French journalist returning from Namibia claimed that locals the Topnar tribes assured him that the quagga had survived in their area.
Have there been such cases in the history of natural science when animals that seemed to have disappeared forever were “reborn”?
Were!
We saw a marsupial wolf, caught a Bermuda petrel, a coelacanth coelacanth coelacanth fish got into the net, found a mysterious flightless bird takahe in New Zealand, finally. Huge expanses of South and Southwest Africa have not yet been explored. Even local tribes do not enter the sultry semi-deserts.

Project Quagga

In 1987, a project was launched to restore the quagga as a biological (sub)species, Quagga Breeding Project. The project was organized with the participation of experts - zoologists, breeders, veterinarians and geneticists. For the project, 19 zebra specimens from Namibia and South Africa were selected, characterized by a reduced number of stripes on the back of the body. Based on this population, nine animals were bred by breeding (fixing the trait), which were placed for observation in Etosha Park, Namibia, and in a special camp located near the town of Robertson, Cape Nature Conservancy farm Vrolijkheid.

On January 20, 2005, a representative of the third generation of the quagga was born - the stallion Henry, which is so similar to a typical quagga that some experts are sure that it is even more similar to the quagga than some museum exhibits of this animal, made from genuine skins, but using skulls of horses or donkeys and other deviations from the original. One of the founders of the project, naturalist Reinhold Rau (English)Russian, was sure that the project would be successful, and soon the restored quaggs would be settled in the expanses of South Africa. However, it is worth noting that these so-called "Rau quaggs" are genetically different from the historical quaggs, which has become a reason for criticism of the project.

see also

• A zebroid is a hybrid of a zebra and a horse, pony, or donkey.

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An excerpt characterizing Quagga

At first glance, the quagga animal may seem like a kind of hybrid of a zebra and a horse. Once upon a time, quaggas inhabited South Africa and were among the few wild animals that have been tamed by man. Here you will find a description and photo of the quagga, learn a lot of interesting things about this extinct animal.

Quagga is an exterminated species of zebra. The quagga animal is equine. The quaggs inhabited vast expanses of the steppes of South Africa. Zebra quagga has an unusual color for its species. Her head and neck are striped like a zebra, and her solid bay rump makes her look like a horse.

But still, the quagga animal is a zebra. This is evidenced by the shape of the head, short stiff mane, tail with a tassel and physique - all these are signs of a real zebra, just an unusual color. The quagga animal had a body length of 180 cm, with a height at the withers of 120 cm. The life expectancy of the quagga was about 20 years.

The stripes of brown and white on the head and neck of the quagga were the brightest, and then they faded and gradually lost in the brown color of the back and sides. There was a dark wide stripe on the back of the quagga. The mane had the same striped flourish as the head and neck.

Once upon a time, numerous herds of quaggs shook the expanses of the South African steppe with the clatter of hooves. They led a nomadic lifestyle and constantly moved in search of food. These herbivores made seasonal migrations to new pastures with grassy vegetation. Small groups of wandering animals united in huge herds and often formed very large concentrations.

Zebra quagga is one of the few extinct animals that was tamed by man and served to protect herds of livestock. Quaggas, much earlier than other domestic animals, could notice approaching predators and alerted their owners with a loud cry.

But along with the domestication of this zebra, its extermination began. At first, quaggs began to be mined because of the strong skin, then the animals began to be displaced territorially, occupying the wild lands of zebras for farms and pastures. But the decisive factor in the extermination of the quagga zebra was the war between Europeans and the indigenous population of Africa. The last wild quagga was killed in 1878. The last quagga in the world died at the Amsterdam Zoo in 1883.

Now real quaggas can only be seen in the photo or in museums. In Russia, there is one of the four stuffed quagga zebras preserved in the world. It is located in the Zoological Museum of Kazan Federal University.

In 1987, experts launched a project for the biological restoration of quaggs. The best zoologists, breeders, veterinarians and geneticists took part in it. For this project, zebras from South Africa were selected, which were distinguished by the least number of stripes on the back of the body. On the basis of these specimens, nine individuals were bred by selection, which were placed for observation in a special camp.

In 2005, the first animal from the third generation of the quagga was born - which turned out to be very similar to a typical quagga. According to some experts, this animal resembled the quagga more than the museum exhibits of this zebra.

One of the naturalists of the project, by the name of Rau, was confident in the success of the restoration of quaggas and hoped that they would soon be resettled in the protected areas of South Africa. However, it is worth noting that genetically these bred zebras differ from historical predecessors and are called Quagga Rau.

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