Syrian Wild Ass

"The Italian traveler Della Valle described a captive "wild ass or little onager" in Basra, southern Iraq, in 1625 and the English excavator of Nineveh, Sir Austen Layard, reported 280 years later that the Bedouin "bring the foals up with milk in their tents...They are of a light fawn colour- almost pink. The Arabs still eat their flesh." In 1859 the onager was becoming scarce in the Syrian desert (Badietesh Sham) and in Palestine but, according to the Englishman Canon Tristram, was still common in Mesopotamia and could be seen in the summer traveling in great white herds as far as the Armenian mountains. The first real threat to the onagers' survival came with World War I when, with the Arab push towards Damascus, the whole area was overrun by heavily armed Turks, Bedouin and British troops, and the automobile began to replace camel and train in opening up the deserts."