Quagga lived among the Khoikhoi and other African tribes in relative peace for as long as anyone can tell. According to one scholar, the quagga "was very easily tamed [and] by nature watchful, and hence acted as a guard to the herds among which it lived." European colonists, however, shot quagga en masse—for sport, for leather, to clear areas for sheep and goat farming, and to feed servants. Preservationists began warning of extinction in the late 1800s; little did they know the quagga was already gone. The last one died in 1883 in an Amsterdam, Netherlands, zoo.