[Vision2020] Meet Eclyse - The Amazing Zebra Crossing

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (August 11, 2007) Daily Mail (England) -

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Meet Eclyse - the amazing zebra crossing

Eclyse has earnt its stripes as one of the zoo's main attractions:
http://tinyurl.com/ywoanc

It looks as if someone tried to give a zebra a respray. . . then ran out of
white paint halfway through the job. 

But in reality there is no artificial colouring on display here. This
amazing but natural coat belongs to Eclyse the zorse. 

Her father is a zebra, while her mother is a horse. And she's walking proof
of how a child inherits genes from both parents. 

Eclyse has earnt its stripes as one of the zoo's main attractions.

For while most zebra-horse crossbreeds sport stripes across their entire
body, Eclyse only has two such patches, on its face and rear. 

The one-year-old zorse was the accidental product of a holiday romance when
her mother, Eclipse, was taken from her German safari park home to a ranch
in Italy for a brief spell. 

There she was able to roam freely with other horses and a number of zebras,
including one called Ulysses who took a fancy to her. 

When Eclipse returned home, she surprised her keepers by giving birth to the
baby zorse whose mixed markings betray her colourful parentage. 

The foal was promptly given a name that is in itself a hybrid, of her
parents' names. 

Now she's become a major attraction at a safari park at Schloss Holte
Stukenbrock, near the German border with Holland, where she has her own
enclosure. 

Udo Richter, spokesman for the park, said, "You can tell she is a mix just
by looking at her. But in temperament she can also exhibit characteristics
from each parent. 

"She is usually relatively tame like a horse but occasionally shows the
fiery temperament of a zebra, leaping around like one." 

Horses and zebras are often crossbred in Africa and are used as trekking
animals on Mount Kenya.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)