Ah yes, how fondly we remember the 1970s. A time of afros, Nixon, and of course, the peak of America’s interest in #
beefalo. English settlers in the American south noticed genetic mixes between
American #Bison and domestic cattle as far back as 1749, but it would be 100 years until the first intentional hybrids and more than two hundred until
beefalo entered the mainstream of American culture. That decade, a peak 6,000 ranchers agreed to raise the fertile hybrid.
#Dzo are the Tibetan cross between
#yaks and
#cattle. Like
#mules, the male version of the hybrid is infertile, but female dzo, or dzomo, are fertile, allowing for the “back breeding” of three-quarter mixes. The hybrids are larger and stronger than the
#yaks and
#cattle of the region, making them ideal pack
#animals for hauling gear to the base of Mount Everest.
We will move on from the
#cattle hybrids in a second, but we must mention the zubron: a cross between cows and wisent. Oh, and what’s a wisent, wiseguy? Those are European woods
#bison that once bordered on extinction, but now are on their way to a comeback thanks to reintroduction efforts. So basically, zubron are Europe’s answer to
#beefalo.
Exactly who authorized the crossbreeding of a
#camel and a
#llama to create the first cama, and then named it Rama? Oh right: the Crown Prince of Dubai.
#Camels weigh six times as much as
#llamas, so suffice it to say that artificial insemination was the only option for researchers in the
United Arab Emirates. They succeeded in 1998, creating an
#animal they hoped would have the wool of a llama with the even temperament of a camel. Rama, to their disappointment, has proven rather moody.
Alberta is apparently the only home where yakalo — the cross of
#yaks and #buffalo — have ever roamed.
A 1926 edition of the Lyon County Reporter describes the successful cross at Wainwright National Park, one of the Canadian national parks created to maintain the population of
American Bison (it was later turned into a military base following WWII). The
#animals reportedly made for great
#meat and shrugged off the Canadian winters, but for some reason never caught on.
Millions of years of evolutionary separation and a mismatched number of chromosomes wasn’t enough to stop one
#goat at
#farm in Northern Germany. He jumped a fence for a romantic encounter with a sheep. Usually, such cross-breeding result in nothing or a stillborn, but
#farmer Klaus Exsternbrink watched his
#sheep give birth to a perfectly healthy geep named Lisa, pictured above. (You could say shoat, but the word already denotes a baby
#pig.)
Iron Age pigs are an ancient
#farm animal with a modern appeal. Scientist bred a male wild boar with a Tamworth sow to create
#pigs resembling ancient paintings, with one unintended consequence: the meat was delicious. The #
animal’s meat is now a common sight at specialty meat markets across around the world.
#Birds have a much easier time crossing species lines than
#mammals, making avian hybrids much more common than mammalian hybrids. Some notable combinations include
pheasants and #chickens, pheasants and
#turkeys, and Canada geese mating with just about every other type of
#geese. Strangely, no one has been able to successfully breed a
chicken and a turkey.
The most common and most practical of all hybrids are
#mules (the offspring of a male donkey and a female
#horse) and hinnies (the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey). Ever since George Washington brought
mule breeding to America (you read that right), mules have played a primary labor role as work animals and pack
#animals for their superior strength and endurance over
#horses. And while they can’t be bred, they can be cloned. In 2003, The University of Idaho succeeded creating the first clone of a hybrid animal — a
#mule named Idaho Gem.
Strangely enough, there are two ways to create combinations of
#sheep and #goats. The first is the old-fashioned
#farm mishap, as described in the case of Lisa the geep above. The other is to mix up the embryos of each
#animal in a bioengineering lab. The result is a chimera — an
#animal made of two genetically distinct cells.
