It is quite clear that cross breeding occurs naturally. When horses and donkeys are kept together for long periods of time, eventually you will get a mule. Anyone who has had a male dog will probably know that it will hump damn near anything: male, female, or inanimate. Sex drive is part of the animal world, and when you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with!

Supposed Dog Cat Hybrids

Interspecies breeding (sometimes called cross breeding) is the act of creating offspring from two different species.  While the creation and study of hybrid plants has been ongoing for hundreds of years, this section of the site deals with interspecies matings. Sometimes these can actually result in offspring.

Interspecies breeding is a very complex subject. Obviously it is not possible to mate any animal with any other animal to produce a strange new creature. . It is commonly believed that for two species to be able to interbreed, they must have the same number of chromosomes. While this is true in most cases there are many exceptions. For example, a horse (64 chromosomes) and a zebra (44 chromosomes) can produce viable offspring. If the animals have a different number of chromosomes, the animal with the smaller number must be the male (e.g., a male zebra and a female horse could produce a foal, but a female zebra could not be impregnated by a male horse). What is most important is that the chromosomes that do match up are homologous. What determines this homology at the cellular level is beyond the scope of this writeup.

In general, cross bred animals are sterile. This is typically related to the fact that even if the chromosomes match up enough to create the offspring, there are still genetic problems that cause the hybrid to be unable to produce children. In cases where then animal can (medically) produce viable eggs or sperm; it again becomes a problem of matching chromosomes with some other species. This is not to say that no crossbred animal can mate, it is just rare.

Most cross breeding occurs between animals in the same Genus. There have been cases where offspring has been produced between animals in different genera but in the same family. However, this is uncommon, and has caused some scientists to question whether the classifications of these animals are correct in the first place.

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