Monday, December 08, 2008

From Larry Allen Dean


South Africa 318, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This looks to have been a 12 animal hitch. Ten of them are clearly zebras but the two “wheel” animals may be something else - - I cannot make out the telltale stripes. Maybe donkeys or cattle? I wonder where this was taken. There is lettering on the roof of a barn in the distance.

Anonymous said...

Ringling had a zebra cart with four animals pulling it in the 1910s. Barnum & London/B&B had a four zebra hitch on one of the pony floats at the turn of the century and in the 1890s. There were also those zebra hybrids on HW in the 1920s. If the advertising is to be believed, Barnum & London also had a two-giraffe team on a float [the assembly shown in several engravings, and therefore likely valid] and also one drawn by two ostriches in the 1880s. Camel, dromedary and even elephant hitches were quite commonplace by comparison.