New Life For A Vanished Zebra? - efforts to breed the 'extinct' quagga zebra in South Africa

International Wildlife, March, 1999

South African taxidermist Reinhold Rau is laboring to breed back the extinct quagga, but what exactly does that mean?

AT THE FOOT of Table Mountain, where tall grasses bake brown in the South African summer sun, Reinhold Rau dumps a box full of fresh green lawn clippings onto the ground and backs away. A trio of unusually colored zebras approaches cautiously for a nibble, while another stallion trots straight for the white-bearded visitor. "Paul, you naughty bugger," he shouts, rushing into the cab of his pickup and cranking up the window. "He just wants to be cuddled," explains Rau, "but he doesn't know his own strength."

The zebra has good reason to feel such affection for his nervous friend. Five years before, Rau had found young Paul, only a few hours old, wandering aimlessly among the herd. Nearby, his mother lay dead, presumably gored by an eland bull. Rau immediately ordered a special formula to feed the newborn foal and helped capture the orphan. But Paul had little chance of surviving unless he could absorb the disease- fighting antibodies from his mother's colostrum milk within a few hours. So Rau knelt before the bloodied

mare and called upon milking skills learned during childhood visits to his grandfather's farm in Germany. "I saved every drop I could get," he recalls.

It was an extraordinary effort, but this was no ordinary foal. His creamy legs, his scantily striped rump and the cafe au lait color of his body gave Rau hope that the Quagga Breeding Project he had founded five years before was progressing toward its ambitious and controversial goal: the revival of the extinct quagga. It is a goal that makes some conservationists cheer and others cringe, raising questions about whether an animal can ever be bred back from extinction.

When Europeans first landed at the Cape of Good Hope, three centuries ago, the semiarid Karoo plains teemed with thousands of "wild asses," as the Dutch settlers called them. Dark brown stripes marked the head and neck of this strange creature, fading away as they progressed across its chestnut shoulders and back. The off-white legs were completely naked of stripes. Soon the newcomers adopted the name quagga--an imitation of the equid's barklike call--from the local Khoi language.

A few pioneers managed to tame quaggas to pull wagons, but mostly the wild grazers were looked upon as pests, devouring grass needed for sheep. Shooting parties would slaughter hundreds of the half-striped zebras in a day. In 1886, when the Cape governor banned quagga hunting, he was too late. The last quagga had died in the Amsterdam Zoo three years before.

Four decades ago, when Rau first arrived in South Africa, the quagga's story ended there. Barring a Jurassic Park miracle, any extinct species is lost forever. And apart from a coterie of German scientists, most specialists in the Equidae family of zebras and horses did count the quagga as a separate species. Over the next 26 years, Rau would turn their ideas upside down.

When does a plains zebra.... ....become a quagga?

A taxidermist by profession, Rau first took an interest in the quagga when the South African Museum of Cape Town lured him from his native Germany. Rau was moved when he first beheld the museum's moth-eaten quagga foal, stuffed with straw. "I felt sorry for it," he says. "Naturally, if one deals with an animal that is extinct, one pays attention." Ten years later, Rau had built up the experience and the courage to remount the delicate foal.

Rau had heard that a debate was raging among scientists over whether to count the quagga as a subspecies of the plains zebras or as a species of its own. One researcher even claimed that the quagga was more akin to the horse than to any of the three zebra species. Rau avoided the argument at the time. "I'm a taxidermist, not a taxonomist," he quips.

Nonetheless, his curiosity was piqued, and he crisscrossed Europe to examine almost all of the world's 23 preserved quaggas. What he saw convinced him to enter the fray. Rau already knew that the living populations of the plains zebra vary widely. In Kenya they are boldly striped from ear to hoof, while the southern subspecies has muted gray- brown shadow stripes and lightly striped legs. Now he observed that the most heavily striped quaggas differed little from the least-striped plains zebras in South Africa. "I found it hard to believe they were different species," he says.

He soon began publishing his opinion. It was a bold effort for someone with no university degree. But his plan was even bolder: to rebreed the extinct quagga from existing plains zebras.

Since two different subspecies of the same animal can mate to produce fertile offspring, Rau figured that quaggas had probably mixed their blood with neighboring plains zebras. In the words of Dr. Eric Harley, a molecular biologist at the University of Cape Town and a member of the quagga project committee, "it is perfectly feasible that the genes which characterized the quagga are themselves not really extinct. They are still there, but rather diluted out and dominated by the genes of the plains zebra. We aim to retrieve those genes."