The zebras are mammals belonging to the family of the horses , the horses , natives of Africa central and southern. The coat of this animal consists of a set of contrasting stripes of color , with its whole body white and some black stripes, arranged vertically, except in the legs, where they are horizontal. They are usually social animals that live from small harems to large herds . Unlike their closest relatives, horses and donkeys , zebras were never truly domesticated.
It is in the African savannahs where zebras inhabit. They are distributed by families: male , females and puppies. These animals, being attacked habitually by lions, can become extremely fast animals, because to escape of the predators , they use the escape and its strong coices, being able to break up to the jaw of a feline . The zebra stripes grow dark with age, and these animals, though they look alike, are not all the same.
There are three species of zebras: the flat -faced zebra , the zebra-de-grevy, and the mountain zebra . The Plains Zebra and the Mountain Zebra belong to the subgenus Hippotigris, but the Zebra-de-Grevy is the only species of the subgenus Dolichohippus . The latter resembles a donkey, to which it is closely related, whereas the two previous ones are more like horses. All three belong to the genus Equus , along with other live equidae.
They are not on the verge of extinction, although the mountain zebra is threatened. The subspecies of the zebra of the plains known as cuaga ( quagga , which designates the sound that the animal produced quahaa ), Equus quagga quagga , was extinct, but projects of crossing between zebras with similar coloration have already recovered the species before extinct, and the project has successfully released several copies in the wild.
Zebras are herbivorous animals, and feed preferentially on grasslands of the African savannah.