Abstract: If, in a mix-up at a costume shop, a couple were issued the front half of a zebra suit and the back half of a horse, it could be considered a quagga disguise. But if the masqueraders were pressed as to whether they were more horse or more zebra, the latest biochemical research advises them to insist on zebra.
The quagga, a South African animal extinct for more than 100 years, has been a source of confusion among taxonomists. Some contend, on the basis of the quagga skins preserved in museums, that this front-striped animal is a zebra, either a fourth zebra species or a variant of the Plains zebra, whose hindquarter stripes are dim. But others have argued that the quagga's teeth and skeleton indicate that its nearest relative is the true horse.
Biochemists joined the fray last year when muscle tissue was obtained from a salt-preserved quagga pelt in a West German museum. The tissue yielded both proteins and genes that could be analyzed (SN:6/9/84, p. 356).
Now the analysis has yielded some results. According to “remarkably concordant” findings on the proteins and on the genes, the quagga was a subspecies of the Plains zebra, says Jerold M. Lowenstein of the University of California at San Francisco. He looked at the binding between a sample of quagga proteins and mixtures of antibodies that bind to blood-serum proteins of each of the extant Equus species. The quagga sample bound more of the antibodies against Plains zebra serum than against the other species. Lowenstein calculates that the quagga relationship with the Plains zebra is six times closer than its relationship with the two other zebra species.
“We had to use special techniques to show the difference,” Lowenstein told SCIENCE NEWS. “There is 99 percent identity on the protein level. All the [Equus] species diverged within the past 5 million years, which is only yesterday in evolutionary terms.”
The quagga-Plains zebra relationship is further supported by the analysis of quagga mitochondrial genes performed by Russell Higuchi and Allan Wilson at the University of California at Berkeley. They find seven times as great a difference between quagga and Mountain zebra DNA as they do between quagga and Plains zebra DNA.
“Stripes, the molecules tell us, do make a zebra,” Lowenstein concludes in the July 18 NEW SCIENTIST, “and the half-striped quagga was a Plains zebra.”

Abstract: INTRODUCTION Thinking about Animals For nearly as long as anything can be inferred about human cognition, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists believe humans have thought carefully about animals, about the “predominant characteristic” of each animal, and about those “contradictory elements” that make up humankind. This careful thought has had many outcomes, some scientific, others not. Among the scientific outcomes in the 19th century was evolutionary thinking about the causes and consequences of domestication, including Charles Darwin's study (32) of the mechanics of human (artificial) selection of domesticated animal and plant population characteristics. In the 20th century, theoretical refinements and the painstaking collection of empirical data have led to studies of such disparate phenomena as the physical consequences of keeping pets (12); the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria as a result of feeding antibiotics to livestock (117); and the evolutionary consequences of milkdrinking (99). Speculation about the origins of human-animal interaction is not the exclusive province of scientists: religions and storytellers alike customarily try to account for the beginnings of human-animal interaction. Genesis does so

Abstract: In colts and fillies observed from birth to 24 weeks old, coprophagy occurred from Weeks 1 to 19. Its frequency was greatest during the first two months. Coprophagy was rarely observed in mares and stallions. Foals usually ate the faeces of their mother but were observed to eat their own and those of a stallion and another unrelated mare. Urination by the foal occurred before, during or after 26 per cent of the coprophagy incidents. It is hypothesised that foals may consume faeces in response to a maternal pheromone which signals the presence of deoxycholic acid or other acids which the foal may be deficient in and which it may require for gut immuno-competence myelination of the nervous system. Such a pheromone may also serve to accelerate growth and sexual maturation. Coprophagy may also provide nutrients and introduce normal bacterial flora to the gut.

Abstract: The `jigsaw puzzle' approach is a general method for investigating how interactions among individuals cumulate to form the overall patterns of dominance behaviour in groups. Here, the model is used to discover how aggressive interactions between pairs of individuals modify subsequent interactions with bystanders or third parties. The model indicates that four sequences of successive, aggressive acts are possible in component triads of larger groups: two ensure transitive attack relationships and two can lead to either transitive or intransitive relationships. An application of the model to 14 groups of four hens demonstrates that the two sequences guaranteeing transitivity make up 77% of all sequences. More specifically, hens attacking one group member usually go on to attack a second member, and hens receiving one attack frequently receive a second attack from a bystander. In contrast, an attacked hen rarely `redirects' an attack to a bystander, and a bystander rarely attacks a group member who has just attacked another individual. The application of the jigsaw puzzle approach to aggressive sequences in other species is discussed. Data available for several primate species corroborate the findings in hens and provide support for the method as a general tool for investigating the proximate mechanisms of hierarchy formation.