Fowler
Today, in the latest report on strange ranches of the Colorado flatlands, we find plumber and rancher Paul Whipple going through his typical morning checklist, which looks like this:
Organize plumbing work orders.
Check plumbing supplies.
Feed the zebras.
“Some guys spend their money in bars and some guys spend their money playing golf,” Whipple said. “I spend my money raising zebras.”
So there they mingle out behind the Whipple farmhouse, six Grant’s zebras, one of five subspecies of the plains zebras that range naturally in staggering herds of up to 10,000 across the Serengeti Plains. In this case, though, they roam in a corral across the street from the Fowler Cemetery.
It’s the strangest of sights out under the towering cottonwood trees in a maze of corrals and pastures and barns. There is a great big papa zebra, a pair of young mares, two middle-sized momma zebras and one little teeny, tiny zebra born four months ago.
“We had a crop-spraying plane fly over our house a while back and it kept circling back around, flying lower and lower,” said Sharon Whipple, Paul’s wife. “A while later we get a call from the Fowler Airport. It was the pilot and he says, ‘I just wanted to know if I saw what I think I saw.”‘
The Whipple zebra herd has been growing slowly since the spring of 1999. Paul’s brother, Jim, who owns a ranch in the California desert east of San Diego, had been buying, breeding and selling the strikingly marked relative of the horse for about a decade.
“I’d help him trailer them from a farm in Missouri back to California,” Paul said. “We’d stop here for a bit. One day I just thought I might like to keep one.”
And you know how that goes. You get a female zebra, and then you get a male zebra and pretty soon they’re horsing around and about 11 months later you’ve got a baby zebra.
“The herd just kept growing,” Whipple said. “I never tried to sell any of them. But now I have to sell the 4-month-old foal and one of the mares to keep the bloodlines clean.”
Generally, any place you can raise horses, you can also raise zebras.
If you want one, be prepared to write a hefty check. A zebra can bring between $5,000 and $10,000, according to Whipple and websites that chronicle the zebra trade.
“My brother has sold ’em to individuals mostly, not petting zoos,” Whipple said. “Usually to women in Texas and the Carolinas and, of course, California. The only point I can see to having a zebra is that these gals have more money than they know what to do with. And they look around and ask themselves, ‘What can I have that my neighbor doesn’t have?’ A zebra fits that bill.”
Although born in captivity, the zebras of Fowler retain most of their wild nature, shying away from visitors at first but if feeling threatened quickly forming a menacing protective ring around the young foal.
“They kick, and they bite,” Whipple said, “and they can do both of those things at the same time.”
Whipple has been bitten and has also had his shoulder dislocated by one of his zebras, which reach a weight of about 800 pounds and have a hide so thick and tough that Whipple says it’s nearly impossible to penetrate with a vaccination needle. That is how his shoulder got dislocated a few years back.”
“They are,” he said, “wild animals. They’re really nothing like a horse.”
And to answer the ages-old question – black with white stripes or white with black stripes? – we now introduce one of the Whipples’ grandchildren, 4-year-old Thor Schiffer, who lives down the road.
“They’re white with black stripes,” young Thor said. “You can tell because their underneath part, their belly part, is white and doesn’t have any stripes.”
And then he got a big smile on his little face.
“I’m the only kid in town,” he said, “whose grandpa has zebras.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@ denverpost.com.
