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Hebras or Zorses?

July 5, 2007 on 2:41 pm | In Just For Fun | No Comments

These things are adorable! Zebra/horse hybrids. I had no idea such a thing could even exist, but a little research proved to me it wasn’t as unusual as I would have thought. For example, there was a Shetland Zorse born in the UK in 2001. According to the BBC, “The owners of the pony, called Tilly, had no idea she was pregnant when they bought her from a wildlife park, where she had been kept in a field with a male zebra.”

The BBC story from 2001 has it wrong though, when they claim only “zorses” can be born – that would be a zebra father and horse momma. There also appears to be “hebras” – zebra momma and horse daddy, which is what caught my attention in a BBC video today. Just from what I’ve seen searching for pics on the internet, it seems the zorses have the base color of their mothers with stripes from their sires. The hebra seems to have patches of zebra and horse skin in odd locations.

There’s also an interesting website devoted solely to posting pics of these animals. They also have zonkeys – zebras crossed with donkeys. Weird stuff. The German zoo claims they want to try to breed the hebra mare that is now one of the main attractions at their zoo. I’d always heard horse/donkey hybrids – mules – were infertile. I wonder if the horse/zebra hybrid will prove to be the same. It would be interesting to see if the striped patterns pass down to subsequent generations, and just how much the resulting animal takes after one or the other of its ancestors.