SPOTTED ASSES 
An Animal That, Like the Camel and Elephant, Rarely Has Spots*—Piebalds 
More Ccn mcn in Other Domesticated Animals—Selective Breeding 
Probably Largely Responsible for T his Albinism 
ALBERT ERNEST JENKS 
Professor of Anthropology, University of M imnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. 
investigations of the hereditary 
spotting of human skin I one day 
chanced to recall that many 
individual members of the species of 
domestic and pet animals and fowls 
with which I am most familiar at home 
are spotted with white. The wild 
members of domestic species and the 
wild species most nearly akin to our 
domestic animals are typically or spe- 
cifically marked. Seldom is this specific 
marking spotted white. A little time 
spent in the library showed that the 
spotting of most of the members of the 
species of domestic and pet animals is 
non-specific, and showed that all species 
of domestic and pet animals spot, except 
the elephants, camels, and asses (Equus 
asinus.) Further research revealed 
spotted individuals among the Asian 
elephants (Elephas indicus), and the 
African camels (Camelus dromedartus). 
Nowhere could I find record of spotted 
asses. 
At that stage of my interest in the 
question of the spotting of animals and 
men I made a trip to California and 
Arizona, and returned wa New Mexico 
and Texas. There are many thousands 
of asses (locally called burros) in those 
States. lL inquired of a score of persons 
long resident in the southwest, but found 
no one who recalled ever having seen a 
burro marked with white spots. Ispent 
eight weeks during January, February, 
and March, 1914, in Arizona from near 
the Mexican border to near the central 
part of the State. No one of whom I 
inquired had ever noticed a spotted 
burro. I began to think that the ass 
should be added to the traditional leop- 
ard as a conservative in skin pattern. 
NOUR years ago when carrying on 
March 10, 1914, while driving imme- 
diately south of Tucson, Arizona, the 
burro shown in Fig. 7 was discovered. 
She was a small fawn-colored jenny with 
an irregular “‘blaze’’ face. She seemed 
determined to finish her feeding by the 
roadside, but was finally started toward 
home. She settled down ‘‘at home”’ in 
a small woven-wire corral with two 
other small jennys, one of which had a 
colt. The burros were in the possession 
of a group of Mexicans who had recently 
drifted northward from the State of 
Sonora, Mexico (a distance of about 
sixty miles), because of the revolution 
there. They reported they had brought 
the spotted burro from near the Mexican 
border where it had been sired by a jack 
which: “looked just like it.” The 
mother of the blaze-faced animal is 
light brown with the usual light> col- 
ored muzzle and belly areas. 
March 14, 1914, I passed by train 
through Charleston, Arizona, where 
there were three large brown burros 
feeding near the station. One of them 
had a blaze-face, and its right fore foot 
was also white to well above the ankle. 
The next day near Marfa, Texas, I saw 
two other white-faced brown burros. 
After that I felt that there was nothing 
new under the sun—even in the mark- 
ings of burros. 
IN MEDITERRANEAN LANDS 
April and May, 1914, were spent in 
north Africa in Algeria and Tunisia, and 
in Sicily. In those countries I saw 
literally thousands of asses or donkeys. 
There were the usual ones of light fawn 
color, the browns, the blacks, the ash- 
grays, and a few which were white!, but 
1 Lydekker speaks of the Damascus breed of asses as frequently exhibiting white animals. 
—The Horse and Its Relatives, p. 222. 
165 
