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
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.
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