Hold Your Zorses: The sad truth about animal hybrids

from Slate:


Hold Your Zorses
The sad truth about animal hybrids.

By Jason Bittel




Mix a zebra and a horse, and you get a zorse. Swap the horse for a donkey, and you have yourself a zonkey. When a pony and a zebra love each other very much, you wind up with a zoni.

It’s fun to think of animal hybrids as the Reese’s peanut butter cups of nature. You take a little of this and mix it with a little of that, and voilà—you get an end product more interesting (and delicious?) than the creatures you started with. But hybridization has its costs.

Zebroids—the name for any zebra-based hybrid—are almost always infertile, and they sometimes suffer from dwarfism. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising. While horses, zebras, and donkeys look similar and belong to the same genus (Equus), each species has a different number of chromosomes. So just because you can interbreed them doesn’t mean you should.

.......(snip).......

Big Cat Rescue has cared for numerous hybrids over the years, including a liger that has since died. Bass says any hybridization between big cat species is irresponsible breeding at its worst, a deed done only for greed and with absolutely no conservation value.

“They are bred for lives in a cage. They’re never going to be released into the wild. There is no wild for these cats,” she says. ..............(more)

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/06/zonkeys_ligers_the_sad_truth_about_animal_hybrids.html