6 - Extinction

Summary

Quaggas probably numbered hundreds of thousands in the eighteenth century. Hunted for millennia by indigenous people, they were shot by settlers for low-value items and later by big-game hunters. In the mid-nineteenth century, hunters killed quaggas on a large-scale when their hides became valued as high-quality leather; meat from this slaughter was eaten by diamond miners in Kimberley. Loss of habitats and water sources to farming was probably another factor contributing to their demise. The quaggas’ fate is compared with that of Cape mountain zebras, Equus zebra zebra, and bonteboks, Damaliscus pygargus pygargus which came close to extinction but were conserved initially on farms. Quaggas were extirpated in an ever-widening area whose epicenter was Cape Town until the last wild animal probably died in the Orange Free State in the late 1870s; the last captive quagga died in the Amsterdam Zoo on August 12, 1883. Quaggas were sought far outside their known range as late as the 1950s, and people have often denied the human causes of their extinction. This chapter uses quaggas as a case study to examine how people think about extinction and its causes.