Also – do they have white base with black stripes or black core with white hair? How did this help them survive in the wild?
In: Biology
Answer: There has been a selection process over several generations that reinforced aggressiveness in zebras.
The ones that were too nice got killed. The mean and nasty ones survived, passing on the trait to their offspring.
A zebra will bite, kick and fight off other animals like there are no rules.
As such, they are nearly impossible to tame.
There are a variety of factors that make domestication possible or impossible. Animal instinct is very powerful and domesticating a species takes centuries of work. Zebras are not a domesticated species. Horses have been domesticated over thousands of years, and for a huge chunk of that time, people didn’t even ride them. Horses were, for the most part, too small to actually ride, which is why they were initially used as draft animals, and also why chariots and carts predate saddles. Eventually humans were able to make better saddles, and more importantly, stirrups, which are what really enabled the use of horses for riding. By that time horses had already been domesticated for millenia, with many different breeds and breeding itself was understood well enough, so larger horses suitable for riding were selectively bred.
Zebras on the other hand lack many traits that make horses suitable for riding. First and foremost, the species has not been domesticated. Domestication takes at least a century or two at minimum. Zebras are wild animals. They’re skittish, panicky and aggressive by nature. They run away if you try to approach them, and if you get close enough to them they bite and don’t let go or try to kick and trample you. They also reflexively duck when something or someone jumps at them, which makes them very hard to lasso and capture. They don’t have a social structure like horses do. They don’t have herds, they don’t have group leaders and they don’t have families. They do travel in groups but this is purely a survival tactic because a group offers better chances of survival, but they don’t care if one of them is attacked, and they don’t have any particular attachment to any other member of their group. Horses form herds which have a hierarchical structure. This makes it possible for humans to be acknowledged as a leader. Zebras are also generally too small to ride, just like horses used to be.
Basically zebras are not domesticated as a species. Horses are, due to being very valuable historically. There are very few truly wild horses left in the world, wild horse meaning horses that belong in a breed that has never been widely domesticated. Free horses that live in the wild that are descendants of domesticated horses are called feral horses, and comprise the majority of horses in the wild. All that is not to say that there aren’t exceptions. Zebras are too small and too aggressive to be ridden but there have been a few individual cases in which it has been achieved. However all of these were exceptions and it does not change the fact that most attempts to domesticate zebras would end up in failure.
As for their coloring. While they may stick out to us, their color pattern actually provides good camouflage for the eyes of their predators, mainly lions.
Riding on horseback wasn’t used until the 4th century BCE china, which is SUUUUPER late in military AND domestication history. Early war wagons had been used around 2500 BCE in mesopotamia, but had a mixture of pack animals like oxen and donkeys pulling them, not just horses.
Horses weren’t domesticated until sometime between 3500 BCE and 2000 BCE.
So horses were fully domesticated and put to work and selectively bred for thousands of years before one was bred to be big, brave, and trainable enough to ride in war. Well, ridden commonly enough that it shows up the in few records left.
this question comes up a bunch and the fact is zebras are absolute ice cold dicks. they kick at the first sign of trouble and if that trouble doesnt die they bite and hold on to drag that trouble into the nearest water source to drown it. africa doesnt fuck around with domesticatable animals because theyre all hardcore af
Have you ever met a zebra?
They’re not domesticable. They are pains in the fucking ass, stubborn, unpredictable, pains in the ass.
Zebra are black with white stripes. We know that because zebra fetuses are black before the stripes appear.
Casual geographic has several videos about zebras. Long story short they have not been domesticated because they cannot be
Why haven’t any cavalry painted their horses like zebras?
1. Zebras aren’t horses. Zebras are asses and unsuited to such uses.
2. Zebras can’t be domesticated. We’ve tried. For millennia.
Because they evolved in a place where literally everything else wants to eat them, zebras are extremely hard to tame.
A horse might freak out and buck its rider off, but a zerba will freak out, buck its rider off, kick the shit out of the rider until they stop moving, and then run away never to be seen again. So historically there are few instances of people taming zebra let alone getting them to the level of loyalty needed to be used in calvary.
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