Africa
and E. b. boehmi, Kilimanjaro.
Whether naturalists are justified in creating so many sub-species on such slender distinctions in marking and colouring may well be doubted.
Burchell's zebra is one of the softest and most easily slain of all the game animals of Africa, and a single bullet will usually suffice to turn the animal out of the troop, when it may be easily finished off. With a broken leg, the Burchell's zebra is unlike the antelope and deer families-rendered at once quite helpless. Its paces in flat. open country are very good, and unless the hunter is exceedingly well mounted, a troop of these zebras will often gallop right away from him. The flesh is sweet and unpalatable to Europeans, and the fat very yellow; nearly all natives are, however, extremely fond of zebra meat. Of all animals, the lion is, perhaps, the fondest of the zebra, and large numbers of Burchell's and Grèvy's zebras are slain annually by these carnivora, lying in wait near the drinking places. Zebras cannot resist thirst as can many of the antelopes, and usually drink each night or at very early morning. Of late years a good many of the young of Burchell's zebras have been captured alive by Dutch hunters. Some numbers of these were broken to harness and tried in Transvaal mail coaches and carts. It was found, [ZEBRA however, after careful trial, that they were unable to stand the wear and tear of prolonged and heavy coach work so well as horses and mules, and the experiment has since been abandoned. Mr. Walter Rothschild has used four of these animals in a coach for light work in London and Hertfordshire with some success, and the animals appeared to lend themselves to domestication more easily than any others of the various species of this group.
The Quagga (Equus quagga), which takes its name from the Hottentot word quacha-derived from the peculiar neigh or cry of the animal-was formerly extremely abundant in the Cape Colony, and, it is believed, parts of Griqualand West and in the Orange Free State. Its habitat was curiously restricted, and it seldom or never seems to have wandered beyond these limits.
So lately as the time of Cornwallis Harris (1837) the animal is described by that great naturalist and sportsman as inhabiting the plains of the country now known as the Orange Free State in " immense herds," and even in Gordon Cumming's time (1843-1850) it was quite common on the northern karroos of the Cape Colony. Its downfall was wrought entirely by the skinhunting Boers, and its final extinction seems to have taken place somewhere between 1865 and 1870 in Cape Colony, and possibly a little later in the Orange Free State.
The quagga was invariably a denizen of wide, open plains, where it roamed in herds, numbering in the aggregate tens and hundreds of thousands. Upon the march, these animals usually moved in single file, in long lines; when grazing the animals scattered over the veld; and when really alarmed they fled together in dense troops.
In height the quagga stood about 13 to 13 hands-about that of the Burchell's zebra.
It was, however, of more robust build than that zebra, while in colour and marking it differed widely from all others of this group.
The upper body-colouring was pale rufousbrown, darker upon the face and neck, and the dark-brown stripings usually extended from the head only as far as the middle of the barrel, or, more often, a trifle behind the shoulder. The stomach and legs were pure white. A dark dorsal line ran from the mane to the tail. The ears and tail were more equine than asinine; the tail was white and flowing; the muzzle black; the crest high and arched; the mane full, upstanding, and marked in brown and white. In pace the quagga seems to have been slightly inferior to the Burchell's zebra, and the animal was usually to be ridden into by a light, well-mounted hunter.
H. A. BRYDEN.
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