Norman the zebra was a delight for the few people in the Ranger Creek area that caught a glimpse of him as he made the rounds through wooded neighborhoods last week, checking out neighbor’s garages and eating dog food.But for owner Amy Saxon it was quite a scare. Saxon sent me an e-mail Monday night after I had contacted her for a story I was writing about the zebra sightings.Norman is a Grevy’s Zebra that Saxon, an Arabian horse breeder, purchased from a ranch in Texas. She got him at 4 weeks old and handfed the animal every four hours until he was old enough. All that tender loving care created quite a bond, Saxon says. “He thinks I am his mama, but he also thinks he’s a human,” Saxon wrote. “As he becomes a teenager I (no) longer needed to be in his sight I guess. I let him roam freely on my 40 acres in Muskogee and also at Hilltop Arena in Muskogee. But this time he left.”
Saxon has a lake house along Fort Gibson Lake and the entire area isn’t fenced in. Norman has a pen, but she still lets him out, Saxon said. When Norman took to wandering last Tuesday, Saxon was fretting. “He had been gone about three hours and I had already called the sheriff. He was very disbelieving, kind of laughed and told me to look a little longer,” Saxon wrote.
At 1 a.m., Saxon was nearly at her wit’s end and was ready to call the sheriff in the neighboring county since her ranch is near the Muskogee and Cherokee county line.
“I drove home slightly hysterical…when I heard Norman trotting down the drive,” Saxon wrote.
Zebras deserve a little credit. They’re smart critters and have good memories. Saxon said when Norman was young, she took him to a horse trainer to get him halter broke. After about a week the trainer called to say Norman was ready.
“Now he is halter broke, but whenever Norman comes close to that trainer, he kicks a head high kick at him, only him,” Saxon wrote in her e-mail.
Julie Bisbee
State Reporter