The onager was a gregarious animal of the dry grassy plains and the Old Testament described its habitat precisely as "the steppe for his home and the salt land for his dwelling" (Job 39:6). It was found in Palestine and the countries surrounding it for over 2000 years after the events of the Old Testament, but had almost disappeared by the middle of the nineteenth century. A few lived on in Iraq and southeast Jordan until early this century, but now these are gone as well. Its speed and ability to withstand the worst conditions of the Hammad and Nafud deserts left its numbers unaffected despite the intensive hunting by successive cultures in the area. It was the coming of firearms and automobiles that tipped the scale against it.

Early Arabian Descriptions
Al-Shammakh b. Dirar al-Dhubyani was a poet who was born before the rise of Islam (Jahiliyyah) and died after its event. He lived in Najd and specialised in describing the onager. It is estimated that 172 verses or about 43% of his descriptive poetry dealt with the animal and the hunters who stalked it. Such a body of work was probably an indication of the abundance of the onager in the poet's home territory which included the northern, central and western regions of today's Saudi Arabia.

Al-Dhubyani's language and style were elegant and his description of the onager's external features was precise. He also analysed their inner feelings by describing their anxiety, fear, jealousy and anger as well as their journeys in the desert in search of water, pastures and refuge. It was as if he was describing his own feelings and chronicling his own journeys. He noted that their legs and hooves were strong and made a powerful impact on the ground, dislodging stones and causing them to tumble away. The poet also described the onagers in the safety of their highland refuge, resting, grooming each other and moving their necks as if they were spears in the ground swayed by the breeze.

The scholar Al-Jahiz lived in the 3rd century AH (9th century AD), and was author of the most famous Arab study of zoology, "The Book of Animals". He claimed that onagers lived longer than domestic asses and that he did not know of any domestic ass that lived longer than the famous black donkey that was owned by Abi-Siyarah, an agent of Ibn Khalid al-'Adwani. That animal was said to have lived for 40 years.

In the late 8th century AH (14th century AD) Kamal al-Din al-Damari wrote a popular Muslim treatise "The Great Book on the Life of Animals". In it he relates an account attributed to Ibn Khalkan, claiming that an onager was believed to have lived 200 years or more. The story claims that a group of soldiers passed by a desolate area where they hunted down a number of onagers. They then slaughtered (cut the throat to let the blood drain) one of these onagers and cooked it in the accustomed manner. However, its meat remained tough, so they cooked it for a whole day longer, but it remained as tough as ever. Out of curiosity the soldiers examined the head of the roasting onager. On one of its ears they found a black mark or brand in Kufi script. Ibn Khalkan claimed to have seen the brand himself and that it was that of Bahram Jur, a Persian king who lived long before the time of the Prophet, and who made a practice of branding animals he caught while hunting and then setting them free. Ibn Khalkan concluded that only God knows how old that onager really was.

Al-Damiri also mentions that in the wilderness area of the Jabal al-Mudakhan (smoky mountain) in Syria, so called because of the perpetual fog around it, that onagers lived for more than 800 years! He also mentions one specific location where onagers were to be found: a wilderness area (jurud) near a village in the vicinity of Damascus, Syria, where onagers were so plentiful that they could hardly be counted.

Abu Yahya Zakariyya al-Qazwini, in his encyclopaedic work, "The Wonders of Creation", written in the early 8th century AH (14th century AD), discussed the onager. He said that wild onagers look very much alike. He also claimed that the male will rip off a young foal's testicles to prevent him competing for his mares when he matures. Thus, when a mare goes into labour she finds a secluded place to have her young, fearing that the stallion would castrate her male offspring. When the hooves of the foal harden and he is able to run, the mare will take him back to the herd. Al-Damiri adds that she may even break his leg to immobilise and keep him in one place so he would not roam and encounter the stallion. She then nurses and suckles the foal so that when the leg heals and is well again, the foal would be old and strong enough to escape from his father.

It should be noted that the aggressive behaviour of wild equid stallions and their habit of killing young not sired by them is documented in recent studies of their behaviour. Thus the preceding descriptions of onager stallions castrating young male foals may have been a mistaken interpretation of their attempts to actually kill them.

Stories and accounts of domestic equids being turned loose and becoming feral, abound in Arabia and, regardless of their accuracy, have become part of the folklore of the region. According to al-Damiri the Akhdari named after al-Akhdar (a stallion, some writers say it was a horse, others an ass) that once belonged to the Persian Shah Kisr Ardashir, reverted to the wild and mated with the wild onagers. It is said to have been the founder of this breed that is considered to be the most beautiful and longest lived of the onagers. Day mentions that the Shaleib tribe, as well as other tribes in Arabia, used to release their domestic asses to be impregnated by the onagers. An implication of that practice may mean that certain characteristics of the onager may still be found in some domestic asses today.

A number of different kinds of onager or wild ass were described the Arabs and it is not clear which ones were pure onagers and which were crosses with the domestic asses. The names encountered most frequently are al-Akhdari, al-Akhtab, al-Aqmar, al-Adkhan and al-Atabi.

Hunted Onagers
From earliest times the onager was regarded as a game animal rather than as a potential beast of burden. Bas-reliefs uncovered at the capital of ancient Assyria, Nineveh, depict the hunting expeditions of King Ashurbanipal around 650 BC, and one slab in particular shows two of the king's servants lasooing an onager. They must have been especially skilful and lucky huntsmen because this boastful carving shows the rest of the asses escaping and outdistancing their pursuers with ease. The humbler inhabitants of the region were less chivalrous, for they were hunting for the pot and concentrated on taking the young onagers in the spring foaling season.

Onagers were probably hunted for their meat from the time man first inhabited the different regions of the Middle East. Xenophon, who lived from about 434-355 BC was an Athenian soldier, historian and writer who spent a number of years in the Middle East. He reported that the onager was killed for its meat which was said to be of more delicate flavour than deer.

In 1905 the English excavator of Nineveh, Sir Austen Layard, reported 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". Eating the flesh of the wild ass is permitted (halal) to Muslims because it was considered to be a game animal. The meat of the domestic ass was forbidden as was that of the horse.

The onager's instinct was to escape by running at great speed to the open plains when chased by horsemen who were usually armed with bows and arrows. They were also pursued by the same breed of heavy dogs that were developed in Mesopotamia for use against lions, and these hunting methods were still being practised in Syria until about the beginning of the Christian era.

Al-Nuwayri states that the most common hunting methods during his time (8/14th century) were birds of prey or hunting dogs to chase the onager, metal spikes in their path to cripple them, bows and arrows and spears to kill them.

Al-Qazwini explains that onagers have the habit of staying together and not separating from each other, thus making it easier to hunt them down. If a hunter hides in a place where the path narrows, and allows a few asses to pass, he can then appear in full view of them and shoot as many as he pleases because the remainder will not turn and flee to safety, but follow the others blindly.

Their amazing speed when running from danger was a well known fact to the Arabs, and mentioned in the Koran when describing the retreat of unbelievers "as if they were asses fleeing before a lion", Sura 74, Verse 50.

Domestication Attempts
For a long time the onager was thought to be untameable and this has resulted in some confusion about the draft animals used in ancient Mesopotamia. Further scrutiny of the illustration from the royal cemetery at Ur (c. 2500 BC) has shown that the Sumerians used onagers for drawing four-wheeled chariots; the apparently tufted tail is obvious (in fact the tail is short haired for much of its length), and the identification has been further confirmed by a study of the bones from tell Asmar. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether they were ever fully domesticated, or just onagers being taken with lassoes, presumably for use alive, as is illustrated in a scene from the Palace of Ashurbanipal mentioned above.

Onagers were bridled quite differently from horses, with nose-rings when not working and a strap tied around the muzzle when harnessed up. This suggests that their use for draft purposes was based on previous experience with oxen rather than in imitation of horses in nearby countries, where in any case, it is doubtful if horse were yet in use. When the horse arrived in Mesopotamia, early in the second millennium BC, there was little point in carrying on with the onager. The horse was bigger and stronger, as well as much more amenable, and the horse-bit gave the driver, in his two-wheeled chariot, far better control than he ever exercised over the onager.

The wild ass features mostly in the poetical and prophetic books of the Old Testament where it is usually spoken of as wild and untameable. In Jeremiah 2:24, Jehovah calls Judah "a wild ass used to the wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure". In Genesis 16:12 Hagar is promised that her son Ishmael will be a "wild ass of a man, his hand against every man".

Final Days
In 1625 the Italian traveller Della Valle described a captive "wild ass or little onager" in Basra, southern Iraq. By 1850 the onager was becoming scarce in the Syrian desert (Badiat al-Sham) and in Palestine, but according to the Englishman Canon Tristram, was still common in Mesopotamia and could be seen in the summer travelling in great white herds as far as the Armenian mountains. The first real threat to the onager's survival came with World War I when, with the Arab advance towards Damascus, the whole area was overrun with heavily armed Turks, Bedouin and British troops, and the automobile began to replace the camel and train in opening up the deserts. In 1930 according to the German zoologist, T.Aharoni, "the movements of Bedouin troops during the Great War and the more recent incursions of some tribes, have pushed back these extraordinary shy, freedom-loving creatures into the heart of the desert. They appear so sporadically now that most Bedouin tribes have not seen them at all in recent years". Most likely the onager was already extinct by that time.

As far as the records show the last wild Syrian onager was shot in 1927 as it came down for water at the Al Ghams oasis not far from Lake Azraq in the Sirhan depression of north Arabia. This lava-bed district seems to have been one of the last three pockets of survival for the wild ass. The other two similar areas were the Jebel al-Druze in southern Syria and the Jebel al-Sinjar on the Iraqi-Syrian border. It was from the Iraqi-Syrian border region that the Schonbruun Zoo received a specimen that was still alive as late as 1928. It may have been the last pure-bred Syrian onager in the world, although some writers continue to express the hope that some onagers may still be hiding out in the desert fastness of Saudi Arabia or Oman, possibly with the Arabian ostrich which was known to keep them company. In 1937 Otto Antonius wrote what may be the true epitaph of the Syrian onager "it could not resist the power of modern guns in the hands of nomads, and its speed, great as it may have been, was not sufficient always to escape from the velocity of the modern motor car".