There's this game I play called IW, and in-game you play as a large cat and you just run around and talk to people and hunt animals. Recently there was a game update with new animals and such, and one of the new animals is called a "Quagga." See, there are very often animals in this game that do not exist, so I assumed this was just the creators of the game imagining a brown horse/zebra mix and then making it giving it some odd name. A week later (now), I searched the word "Quagga" on google just for the heck of it, and a photo of a stuffed animal (taxidermy) which looks just like the in-game animal popped up! Complete shock moment: commence now.
I then decided to dig a little. Is this an extinct animal which we offed early on like the Dodo bird and the two wolf types that used to roam Japan? Or is it still alive?
Apparently it's a subspecies of the Plains Zebra, and roamed the better part of South Africa. The last one died at Amsterdam Zoo in 1883. When this mare died, people hadn't realized she was the last or that they had been hunting this subspecies into extinction. This is because apparently everyone was confused about the term "Quagga" and thought it was to be used for ALL zebras. I noticed that there only seems to be a single photo of an ACTUAL Quagga, alive. ONE. It was taken in a zoo in London. I find it sad how people just let things like this happen. The Dodo and the Quagga are both examples of this; our carelessness with the wildlife around us. Part of the reason this zebra was killed off was because farmers around it saw that their animals (goats, sheep, etc) had to compete with it for grazing room. Ridiculous.
...However I do have to give people credit because as I said before, "Quagga" was a term used when referring to ANY zebra, and this is seemingly why there were no last-minute efforts to save this beautiful creature.
I've also read in a couple places that many people have been making an effort to bring back the Quagga as well as they can. Apparently they're doing this using selective breeding; breeding the Southern Plain Zebras which are the most likely to bring out the genes which caused the Quaggas unusual stripe and color patterns.
So I tip my hat to these people that care enough about a mistake made a century ago, that they try to do something about it now.
Anyways, rant time is over.
I just wanted to rant about the Quagga because I find it so odd that people could just let this animal die off, but are also trying to do something about it now even though this animal has been forgotten for a century. I'm also amused how I found this animal in such an insignificant game (with hardly 50-75 people on at a time) and now I'm actually interested in LEARNING about it. This is why I thought it'd be cool to do some research, and being motivated by the need for extra credit... Well this is the result.
I think it's an important lesson in history, right here. We need to be more careful with wildlife and the world around us. More and more animals and plants are going extinct because of our carelessness. We're getting better and better every day with conserving wildlife and making this world a better place, but it's not enough. This is another interpretation of "history repeats itself", because so often centuries ago, and still now we lose all kinds of animal and plant species because we don't stop and think about what we're doing until it's too late or almost so.
Toodles.
-RB
(P.s. The first top photo is the only photo ever taken of a live Quagga, the second (middle) is a photo of a stuffed specimen in Munich, and the third (bottom) is a screenshot of the Quagga in my game.)
Sources:
http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/quagga.htm
http://www.quaggaproject.org/
