Zebra

“ Boys and girls who have visited menageries have probably seen an animal shaped something like a horse, but beautifully adorned with black and tawny stripes, standing silent and sulky in its cage. This is the zebra, the wild horse of the great plains of Southern Africa. There it lives in great herds, and browses on the thin grass and low shrubs of the wilderness. It enjoys the widest liberty, and gallops and gambols merrily with its companions through regions where the foot of man rarely penetrates. ”

“ It is asserted by the most experienced hunters that the gaudy livery of the zebra makes him conspicuous from afar, whether he is on the mountain, on the plain or in the shade of a tree. His brilliant color, therefore, really exposes him to man. ”

“ At first, the sight of a herd of zebras is a surprise, for you have been accustomed to seeing them in the small numbers found in captivity. It is a source of passing wonder that these rare animals should be roaming about the suburbs of towns in hundred lots. You decide that it would be a shame to shoot a zebra and determine not to join in this heartless slaughter. ”

“ Very often, doubtless, as the best naturalists seem to agree, the zebra's automatic start comes in time to save him, and the lion's instantaneous now-or-never second spring, such as probably all felines make, must be guided by a lightning-swift perception which of the violently agitated sky- and reed-stripes are the zebra and which are not! ”

“ I have already prepared good facsimiles of a zebra and the head of an oryx, to show the truly wonderful way in which when looked at from a creeping lion's or leopard's eye-level these animals pass for mere sky-vistas through the reeds or branches. My Washington deer was merely a crude beginning of the exhibitions that I can already give of this type of concealing-costume.
Any child who has access to a wide, open field away from lights can prove for himself that white does not show against a starlit night sky. ”

“ After breakfast we draw near a pond of water; a couple of elephants stand on its bank, and, at a respectful distance behind these monarchs of the wilderness, is seen a herd of zebras, and another of waterbucks. On getting our wind the royal beasts make off at once; but the zebras remain till the foremost man is within eighty yards of them, when old and young canter gracefully away. The zebra has a great deal of curiosity; and this is often fatal to him, for he has the habit of stopping to look at the hunter. ”

“ To the zebra they bore the greatest resemblance—for they were in reality a species of zebra—they were quaggas.
Modern naturalists have divided the Equidæ, or horse family, into two genera—the horse and the ass—the principal points of distinction being, that animals of the horse kind have long flowing manes, full tails, and warty callosities on both hind and fore limbs; while asses, on the contrary, have short, meagre, and upright manes, tails slender and furnished only with long hairs at the extremity, and their hind limbs wanting the callosities. ”

“ Who, but nature, would ever think of laying out a plan for a zebra, and painting it in stripes, like a barber's pole, and yet we must admit that few human artists could paint a million zebras and get the stripes on as perfect as nature does with her eyes shut. The mule and the zebra are distant relatives, 'cause lots of mules have a few stripes on their legs, but the zebra is the eldest son who is aristocratic and inherits the stuff, while the mule is the younger son who never gets a look in for the money, but has to work for a living. ”

“ The temper of all the wild asses is very uncertain, or rather very unreliable. This natural surliness took the form of absolute ferocity in the case of a very fine male zebra. The object of its especial dislike was not so much the occasional visitors to its stable, as the keeper whose duty was to feed it and arrange its stable. The viciousness was such that it would endeavour to climb the railings of its loose box in order to attack them. ”

“ But the effect in nature is just the opposite. The black and white somehow take away the sense of a solid body altogether; the two colors seem to blend into the most inconspicuous gray, and at close quarters the effect is as of bars of light seen through the branches of shrubs. I have found myself in the forest gazing at what I supposed to be a solitary zebra, its presence betrayed by some motion due to my approach, and suddenly realized that I was surrounded by an entire herd which were all invisible until they moved. ”

“ The zebra, which is such a conspicuous animal in our zoölogical gardens, on its native soil and in a bright star-light night, may be so close to one as to be heard breathing, and yet cannot be seen, so completely are its color patterns in harmony with its native habitat. Marine organisms that float on the surface of the water are beautifully tinged with blue in harmony with the color of the ocean as it appears to their enemies above, the birds ”

“ Having recovered from my surprise, I found that the dark object that had nearly upset me was one of the natives stooping over a dead zebra, which the lion had just killed, and then learned, for the first time, to my great astonishment as well as relief, that the wailings which had caused me so much uneasiness, and which I imagined were those of a dying man, proceeded from this poor animal. ”

“ The cry of the zebra is very like a long-drawn growling whistle, and in the distance, when too far off to hear the whistle, the growl very much resembles that of a lion. There were large herds of oryx in sight, and a few rhinoceros and water-buck.
The sun sank gradually lower in the western heavens, and we were still apparently no nearer the range of hills we were making for, so deceptive are the apparent distances in the clear atmosphere. But just as dusk had fallen, our eyes were gladdened by the sight of a large clump of Doum palms growing in the centre of an open green space a mile away. ”

“ Hour after hour they waited until the moon came up, and before them filed uncounted hundreds of animals. There were great droves of zebra, giraffes by the score, three or four rhinoceroses who plunged across the stream and vanished, herd after herd of gazelle, antelope, and wildebeest, and a magnificent drove of the cow-like eland. ”

“ Now there are four other species of “wild asses” in Africa—wild horses some call them—and a fifth reported by travellers, but as yet undetermined. These species bear such a resemblance to one another in their form, the peculiar markings of their bodies, size, and general habits, that they may be classed together under the title of the zebra family. First, there is the true zebra, perhaps the most beautiful of all quadrupeds, and of which no description need be given. Second, the “dauw,” or “Burchell's zebra,” as it is more frequently called. ”

“ A newcomer to Africa would not have looked at it twice: nevertheless, it could be nothing but zebra. These gaudily marked beasts take queer aspects even on an open plain. Most often they show pure white; sometimes a jet black; only when within a few hundred yards does one distinguish the stripes. Almost always they are very easily made out. Only when very distant and in heat shimmer, or in certain half lights of evening, does their so-called “protective colouration” seem to be in working order, and even then they are always quite visible to the least expert hunter's scrutiny. ”

“ The zebra is not the animal the ancients have mentioned under the name of onagre. In the [88] Levant, in the eastern parts of Asia, and in the north of Africa, there exists a beautiful race of asses, which, like the finest horses, are natives of Arabia. This race differs from the common kind, by the largeness of the body, the slenderness of the legs, and the lustre of the hair. They are of an uniform colour, commonly of a fine mouse grey, with a black cross on the back and shoulders, sometimes they are of a bright grey, with a flaxen cross. ”

“ Once or twice I have even seen one jump over the back of another. On another occasion we saw a herd of twenty-five or thirty cross a road of which, evidently, they were a little suspicious. We could not find a single hoof mark in the dust! Generally these beasts frequent thin brush country; but I have three or four times seen them quite out in the open flat plains, feeding with the hartebeeste and zebra. They are about the size of our ordinary deer, are delicately fashioned, and can utter the most incongruously grotesque of noises by way of calls or ordinary conversation. ”

“ Here is our general proposition then.
How and when are we justified in making our next step—a deduction from it?
Suppose our physiologist, whose experience is limited to horses, meets with a zebra for the first time,—will he suppose that his generalization holds good for zebras also?
That depends very much on his turn of mind. But we will suppose him to be a bold man. He will say, “The zebra is certainly not a horse, but it is very like [Pg 275] one,—so like, that it must be the ‘ticket’ or mark of a blood-circulation also; and, I conclude that the zebra has a circulation.” ”

“ The Latins, after the Greeks, have called the wild ass onager, which animal must not be confounded, as some naturalists and travellers have done, with the zebra, because the zebra is of a different species from the ass. The onager, or wild ass, is not striped like the zebra, and is not near so elegant in figure. Wild asses are found in some of the islands of the Archipelago, and particularly in that of Cerigo; there are also many in the deserts of Lybia and Numidia. They are grey, and run so fast that the horses of Barbary only can beat them in hunting. ”

“ I have tried to reason pa out of his unnatural infatuation for zebras, but you might as well talk to a rich old man who gets stuck on a chorus girl, and gives her all his money, and has to go and live at the poor house.
A zebra always looks to me like a joke that nature has played. ”

“ But this is done only for the amusement it affords, because the zebra, like all wild animals, has never quite enough of the endurance that is bred into a domesticated horse to make him useful in harness. In wild life he requires only sufficient stamina to outrun a lion for a short distance. ”

“ On leaving my tent one morning when work was at a standstill owing to the rain, I noticed a great herd of zebra about a couple of miles away on the north side of the railway. Now, it had long been my ambition to capture one of these animals alive; so I said to myself, "Here is my chance!" The men could do nothing owing to the rain, and the ground was very boggy, so I thought that if we could surround the herd judiciously and chase the zebra up and down from point to point through the heavy ground, some of them would soon get exhausted and we should then be able to catch them. ”

“ For myself, I venture confidently to look back thousands on thousands of generations, and I see an animal striped like a zebra, but perhaps otherwise very differently constructed, the common parent of our domestic horse, whether or not it be descended from one or more wild stocks, of the ass, the hemionus, quagga, and zebra. ”

“ The zebra is striped that it may graze unnoticed on the plain, the tiger that it may lurk undiscovered in the jungle; the banded Chaetodont and Pomacentrid fishes are further bedizened to the hues of the coral-reefs in which they dwell610. ”

“ In equus, we have, in the same situation, the zebra, which actually shews the stripes of the tiger, and is as remarkable for its wildness as its congeners, the horse and ass, are for their docility and usefulness. ”

“ Beset on all sides, or partially crippled, they rear on their hind legs, fly at their adversary with jaws distended, and use both teeth and heels with the greatest freedom. While the quagga roams over the plains, the zebra seeks only the high mountainous regions. ”

“ In the females, these bands are alternately black and white; in the males they are black and yellow; but the shades are always lively and brilliant, upon a short, fine, and thick hair, the lustre of which increases the beauty of the colours. The zebra, in general, is less than the horse, and bigger than the ass. Although he has often been compared to these two animals, by the names of the wild horse and the striped ass, he is a copy of neither, but might rather be called their model, if all were not equally original in Nature, and if every species had not an equal right to creation. ”

“ The stripes of a zebra do not follow the lines of its body or limbs, still less the spots of a leopard. In the plumage of birds, each feather bears a part of the pattern which is arbitrarily carried over the body, having indeed certain graceful harmonies with the form, diminishing or enlarging in directions which sometimes follow, but also not unfrequently oppose, the directions of its muscular lines. ”

“ Zebra (Equus zebra) .—The true zebra is a native of South Africa; lives in troops, and is very swift and savage, and therefore difficult to tame. Its general color is creamy white, marked with black cross-stripes everywhere except the belly. The Quagga, its nearest relative, has legs and entire hind-quarters unstriped. It is hunted by the natives for the sake of its beautiful fur and its savory flesh and is also a favorite food of the lion. ”

“ The design of the natives, who, from the first, I take it, well knew what they were about, was simply to possess themselves of the zebra, in which they had fully succeeded. "While some busied themselves in lighting a fire, the rest joined in a sort of war-dance round the carcass, accompanied by the most wild and fantastic gestures, totally disregarding the proximity of the lion, who had only retreated a few paces. ”