![]() ![]() "I thought it was going to be a piece of cake," she said ruefully. Twenty-year-old Shea Inman broke her first horse when she was 14, but Joey, the zebra she bought from a Texas ranch, severely tested her confidence. Over the years I was slowly able to do more he taught me so much, especially patience," says Sebright.Įven well-treated animals can be hard to break in, zebra owners say. He had been abused and had trust issues: "It took months of sitting with a bucket of grain for him to come up to me. ![]() Her father wouldn't buy her one, as they were too expensive, so she raised money for Rarity by working at the local stables.īut Rarity was not the tame animal she'd been promised. ![]() Sebright helps run the Rarity Acres horse ranch in Michigan, and for her, zebra ownership is a childhood dream come true. "You can train a horse in 30 days, but it took three years to train Rarity," says Timianne Sebright, 28, referring to the pet zebra she regularly rides. While a zebra might just seem an exotic substitute for a horse, most can't be ridden, unlike Panettiere's creature. We need buyers to realize they have different needs than horses." "It was an opportunity to educate them about what owning a zebra means. That's when the Hollywood movie Racing Stripes, starring Hayden Panettiere, inspired a gazillion little girls to exotify their equine fantasies. Nunke runs training sessions for novice zebra owners at her California ranch, where she practices equine acupuncture and reiki on zebras with broken bones. Then there are the zebras themselves: Beautiful as they are, horsey as they seem, they're not domesticated like horses. Zebra owners must regularly contend with anti-exotic legislation, such as a January 2014 bill in West Virginia attempting to ban exotic animal ownership. Many states don't require zebra owners to file paperwork, and neither the American Association of Equine Practitioners nor the American Veterinary Medical Association tracks zebra ownership.Īnd while the thought of zebra ownership might make you smile like that little girl in the Frozen T-shirt, it's not an easy trot. (IZZZA itself has registered about 300 zebras, 22 zonkeys - zebra-donkey hybrids - and 13 zorses - the offspring of zebras and horses.) But it's hard to say for sure how many there are. Nancy Nunke, who 10 years ago founded the International Zebra-Zorse-Zonkey Association ( IZZZA), estimates that 3,000 zebras roam, kick and graze in American backyards. Owning a zebra is perfectly legal in most of the United States. You'd be forgiven for not taking her seriously - except that we're at Raz Livestock Sales, where, at a monthly exotic animal auction, zebras regularly go for $4,000. The littlest, who wears a Frozen T-shirt emblazoned with Elsa's face, leans forward, her eyes wide, and announces to her friends: "I really want a zebra!" The crowd is mostly men, tan and weathered from working outdoors, but three little girls perch on a bench in the front. It's a hot, dry day in Kerrville, Texas, and more than a hundred people have gathered in a small circular barn. That doesn't mean buying a zebra is a good idea. And owning them is legal in more places than you might think. Our community is especially indebted to Robb Bennett, Darren Copley and Claudia Copley at the Royal BC Museum for their support of this project.Sure, they're cute. Click the links to view local Galiano island-based observations of species documented so far. For more information on spider identification and collection, please don’t hesitate to contact the project curator.īelow you can explore a data visualization showing the species reported for Galiano. Even then, they must be sexually mature! Spiders are also sexually dimorphic, so you can expect a fair amount of morphological variation in a given species. Because spider taxonomy often relies on the study of minute sexual characters, however, it is often necessary to collect specimens to identify them to species. If you would like to contribute to our knowledge of Galiano Island’s spiders, please add your observations to the Biodiversity Galiano project. 2017), our dataset represents a small fraction of the total spider diversity reported for our region. unpublished data) and 859 species reported for British Columbia (Bennett et al. With 409 species known within the Georgia Depression (Copley et al. A total of 75 species are now reported for the island. To date our community has documented a total of 59 species of spiders (Order: Araneae) for Galiano Island, confirming 36% of the historical records and adding 49 new species to the list. The Spiders of Galiano Island, BC Last updated May 2022 ![]()
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