Can Zebras be Domesticated Like Horses?
It has long been posited that zebras cannot be domesticated like horses. In the nineteenth century, some eccentrics hitched zebras to carriages and tried to use them as beasts of burden and transport. Those were technically attempts to tame zebras, not to domesticate them. Domestication is not the same as taming. A circus tiger that does tricks is not domesticated, but tamed. Domestication involves selective breeding across generations to produce a genetic strain of docile and useful animals. As to zebra domestication, one of mankind’s most useful animals, the domesticated horse, descends from a wild ancestor similar in many aspects to zebras. Wild horses were as jittery, combative, and hostile as zebras. Still, people in the Steppe of modern Ukraine, Russia, and Central Asia domesticated them. It just took them a long time to get to horses that could be ridden and used as draft animals.
That was fine, though: they were not initially interested in riding horses or using them as draft animals. They simply wanted to eat them. For that purpose, both pre-domesticated horses and modern zebras are domesticable. Wild horses were a major food source for societies that lived in their natural range. At some point, thousands of years after the domestication of cattle, somebody realized that horses and cattle share some important traits. Both live in herds, and both submit to a dominant member. To control cattle, you control that dominant member. So at some point somebody figured why not try to control the dominant member of a horse herd? It probably took a lot of trial and error and improvisation, and a process that lasted multiple generations before it was perfected.
