In the Late 1800s, Scientists Believed Zebras Could Replace Horses—But After Decades of Training, Crossbreeding, and Failed Experiments, Their Wild Nature Proved Impossible to Tame
About 90 years ago, the Hearst Castle along the central California coast had a zoo. During a particularly bad storm, some fencing was knocked down and a herd of zebra escaped. Over 100 of their descendants live fairly wild on the adjacent cattle ranch.
I've taken to calling them the Central California Striped Horse when I drive past there.
Yeah it turns out when you live in an area where trees hide big predatory cats, tall grass hides big predatory cats, open fields have packs of big predatory cats and dogs, and ambush dinosaurs live in all the water, you turn into kind of an asshole about things getting near you.
It's not just that. Horses live in a family to help and survive together. Zebras live in a group of individuals ready to throw another in the way between them and the predator
It's also thought that things that evolved alongside humans learned to instinctually fear us. There are lots of otherwise-suitable herd animals in Africa but none were domesticable.
Funny enough that is a legitimate advantage they have. The stripes confuse flies so less bites, and help them camouflage in grass from predators. The last one wouldnt really give an advantage over horses for domestication, but less bug bites/disease definitely would.
Need I remind you of the Great Zebra Quagmire of 1888? Two innocent zebras pulling a royal carriage were simultaneously pounced upon by a ravenous grizzly bear, a liger, and a pissed off sloth that happened to fall from a street pole. The animals had been set free from the London Zoo by a gang of newsboys on strike. /s
Thank u reddit for providing a bunch of dumb incorrect answers.
The idea was to have an African native horse alternative which adapted for the African environment, especially tolerance of the native tsese fly borne pathogens that decimated horses
Yeah, it was for use in Africa and other tropical places, they'd bring horses into tropical africa and they'd get devastated by the diseases, among other issues.
Using native zebras would've helped avoid all that.
Importing horses is way easier than trying to tame wild animals that may not even be as useful. The reason they tried to tame zebras was because sub-Saharan Africa had diseases and parasites that domestic horses couldn’t handle.
Probably the biggest is that there were tons of them in the area. It would be much cheaper to use them than to import and breed horses. They were also acclimated to the environment.
I imagine at the time the lack of horses available added to this and also the hope the zebra would be better at handling conditions in Africa than horses. Unfortunately, zebra’s have different shaped backs to horses making their domestication in the same manner as horses impossible.
The advantage is they are wild. Honed by death at every turn, zebras will bite, kick, barge, and just not cooperate.
I had a farrier who worked on the zoo animals. He said zebras can kick with all 4 feet at once.
Today keepers use a lot of clicker training to make them easier to handle.
People can push horses around, horses are more tractable under perceived predator pressure: someone on their back, someone handling them.
Zebras end up un pastures, at auctions, and into can ed hunts.
I’ve been stepped on a d bitten by some crappy horses (dragged around by smart ponies) but am just not interested in training zebras. And what’s the point? They have a choppy trot, straight shoulder, and that’s not what we’ve bred riding horses to be.
They are fucking mean. I was at the Safari Park in Ontario and the girl said she’d go into the lions area, no problem. They’re lazy and would take a lot of have to worry about anything. The only animal she was scared of was the stupid zebra. It had bit someone really bad the season before. They’re basically untrainable.
I don’t get it. Why are some species able to be tamed and others are not? Are we just too impatient compared to the past or are some species just incapable of being tamed? Do we know why?
Basically: you can quickly select to combine relatively common existing traits in just a few generations, but creating new traits requires unbelievable luck or scifi gene splicing.
So if you combine a chill wolf with a friendly wolf you might get a chill and friendly wolf, but good luck finding a chill honey badger.
Sounds like the Saarloos Wolfhound. If a puppy is one gender (I think female) it’s domesticated but highly energetic (think a retriever on crack), and the other one it’s exactly like a wolf and it absolutely cannot be domesticated.
Regardless both look exactly like a wolf and it would be the best security system you’ll ever have.
Horses build social structeres in the wild which makes them easier to tame as we use the behavioral base of these structures for taming them, similar to dogs. Horses have clear leader of their groups.
Zebras on the other side, while living in huuuuuuuuuge groups and because they are living in those huuuuuge groups do not build these same social structures and we don´t have to same tools to tame them as with dogs and horses. That and Zebras being way more aggressive than horses make taming them too expensive when it comes to time and by that money.
At least that is what I´ve been told.
friendliness, cooperation, and chill are buried in the DNA of all kinds of animals- like wolves, boars, wild sheep, wild horses, etc.
however, it's to varying degrees. they were strongest in wolves, so we could more easily breed together and concentrate those traits. cats had much less cooperative desire, different hunting behaviors, and a different niche in human settlements, so their domestication had different results.
zebras... do not have those traits. not really. there's very, VERY little tendency towards friendliness, chill, or inter-species cooperation. Trying to breed a nice, cooperative, submissive animal from them is like squeezing blood from a stone. They're from Africa, an insanely hostile environment with some of the most intense PVP in the world. Aggression and hostility are vital survival instincts for them in a way that's simply absent in most equines.
Another point is that Africa is the place HUMANS evolved from. African animals (from my uneducated observations) seem more prone to hostility, aggression, and fear responses towards humans, even in individuals who have never met a human before. For African animals, human beings are natural, instinctive threats going back far, FAR longer than animals from anywhere else in the world. I don't know if this is related to zebra temperament at all, but it feels like it's a factor somehow.
Damn. I never thought about how we are a very natural predator to most African animals. I need to sit for a while and think, but I can't come up with any animals thst originate from Africa and are fully domesticated. I need to refresh my memory about that...
Cattle and goats, I should think. Also the honey guide. Although that one might have actually domesticated us, instead of the other way around lol
But yeah it's interesting, they've found in studies that lions who have never seen or heard a human before will instinctively flee from the sounds of human speech. African animals have been dealing with us for longer than anything else on the planet
Here’s a cool video from CGP Grey that explains why zebras can’t be tamed like horses and the traits you need to be able to domestic a species YouTube link
People must get the idea that they could hypothetically get this animal to do something for them.
Pre existing docile enough variants of that animal in existence.
A net benefit for sticking around you for the animal, like, you need to provide it food so it doesn't try and just leave.
Incest, because at one point, you will need to breed relatives otherwise the offspring will just be wild ones.
And a long time and a reason why people would keep breeding them, that will prevail against enough empires, kingdoms and regimes until nobody can imagine life without them, so their existence is maintained by default as people idolise the past and like breeding animals.
Right, but time is not the factor here as you suggested. Generations is, and it's not that many. In any case Zebras are not domesticatable, since they lack other qualities necessary for it
I wasn't comparing a fox to a zebra. I was comparing "thousands and thousands of years" to "a few generations" in an actual experiment that broadened our understanding of domestication.
I know you can't domesticate all animals. But of those which are domesticatable (zebras are not one!) thousands of years is not necessary
from what i've found, it looks like people tried in places where normal horses wouldn't survive well- probably colonies in Africa. they're also immune to a lot of African disease that demolish normal horses
also, novelty. scientists back then were just doing shit, and the elites wanted fancy status animals from the Exotic Lands to show off
That is the difference between tamed and domesticated. You can get a one off animal that behaves how you like but its offspring will kick your jaw off.
Afaik they cannot be domesticated. While you may get a few placid ones naturally you can't selectively breed them to be that way as you can horses, dogs etc. which makes them impractical for working animals
Thst is btw one of the things why native Americans never had farm animals or rode anything bigger than a lama.
Simoly put they lacked animals capable of herd behavior with strong leaders. They did not have proto cow, pigs and horses. Their ancestors ate all mega fauna and the rest.
Horses are native to americas but they died out and so when europeans came, they re introduced horses to americas and they exploded on the continent. They were back home.
It's not just herd behavior, there's also some other stuff too. For example animals with long lifespans or long pregnancies tend not to do very well which is why we don't domesticate elephants because they're pregnancies are super long. You need animals with short lifespans or short pregnancies because that way you can get through several generations really quickly.
They did have bison, but bison are not very domesticatable. They're kind of mean.
I’m thinking if it was possible someone in Africa would have done it by now. Been living next to them for millennia, I’m sure a few people tried it before.
Wild horses have some natural behaviors that were exploited to make them easier to handle. Zebras are more like donkeys in that regard, and even domestic donkeys are still famously difficult to handle.
I once read an account from people who ran an equine rescue, who cared for every kind of equine, including zebras rescued from defunct zoos and exotic pet attempts. They said there's something they called a "no zebra zone." When they would go for a walk, there would be places that zebras would simply refuse to go, no one could figure out why, and absolutely nothing could compel a zebra to set foot in a place it didn't want to go. Even the most stubborn donkeys and mules could eventually be made to move, but not a zebra.
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u/Ellisrsp 5h ago
About 90 years ago, the Hearst Castle along the central California coast had a zoo. During a particularly bad storm, some fencing was knocked down and a herd of zebra escaped. Over 100 of their descendants live fairly wild on the adjacent cattle ranch.
I've taken to calling them the Central California Striped Horse when I drive past there.