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.
Its fun to think of animal hybrids as the Reeses peanut butter cups of nature. You take a little of this and mix it with a little of that, and voilàyou get an end product more interesting (and delicious?) than the creatures you started with. But hybridization has its costs.
Zebroidsthe name for any zebra-based hybridare almost always infertile, and they sometimes suffer from dwarfism. Perhaps this isnt 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 doesnt 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. Theyre 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