Breeding back

As a holiday job during my undergraduate degree I worked at the iThemba Labs particle accelerator in Cape Town. They have a braai (barbecue) event annually.

I was told we were eating a quagga, an extinct species of zebra that was being bred back on the grounds of various facilities in the area. They have to periodically cull the quagga that roam free on the grounds of the particle accelerator.

When people ask how it tasted I say "rare".

More a novelty than an actual scientific undertaking, since most "breeding back" currently being undertaken is just selecting for a few of the most prominent physical features.

It's an interesting idea, but I would guess we'll have better luck with direct genetic manipulation of embryos and then using the existing species to birth them.

In the linked article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_cattle (an attempt to breed back aurochs), this is amusing:

"Derek Gow, a British conservationist who operates a rare breeds farm at Lifton near Okehampton in Devon, bought a herd of 13 Heck cattle from Belgium in 2009.[15] The herd grew to 20 animals, but in January 2015 it was reported that Gow had had to slaughter most of them due to high levels of aggression, leaving just six."

It's interesting to think that Eurasia and North America once had a diversity of megafauna comparable to Africa and Australia.

Pleistocene rewilding seems unrealistic, but it's nice to think about.