While most other zorses have stripes across their entire body, Eclyse looks like she’s had her face and rear flank painted by a very clever artist. But the markings are real, and she’s become a major attraction at a safari park in the German town of Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock.
Her mother, Eclipse, had spent a short time at a ranch in Italy, where she shared a paddock with other horses, as well as a zebra called Ulysses. On her return to Germany, Eclipse surprised her keepers by giving birth to the baby zorse. (The hybrid foal’s name is itself a hybrid of her parents’ names.)
And it’s not just Eclyse’s physical markings that reflect her ‘mixed’ parentage, but her temperament, too. ‘She is usually relatively tame like a horse,’ said a park spokesman, ‘but occasionally shows the fiery temperament of a zebra, leaping around like one.’
The numerous examples of horses, zebras and donkeys interbreeding with one another points to them all being descended from the same original ‘kind’ created on Day 6 of creation week (Genesis 1:24–25).[3] It also demonstrates that Noah needed far fewer animals than sceptics like to claim—he only needed two ‘horses’, i.e. one male and one female of the equine kind.4
And what might those two ancestors of today’s donkeys, horses and zebras have looked like? It seems probable that at least one of that Ark-borne pair must have had stripes, because while it’s now been documented that zebra offspring can progressively lose stripes (in just a few generations),[5] horse offspring apparently cannot gain stripes unless a striped equine is (re-)introduced into the population—as is beautifully demonstrated by Eclyse.[6]
