the quagga roamed the karoo in great numbers together with wildebeest and ostriches, which always seemed to accompany them. these quagga seemed gentle and easy to domesticate. (a pair of quagga was used to draw a horse carriage through london, more for curiosity than for any superiority the quagga might have had over a horse.) they were consequently also easy prey for hunters, who hunted them for sport rather than their meat. by the middle of the 1800s, they were almost extinct, and in 1883, the last one died in an amsterdam zoo.