Domestication of Wild Animals vs Taming Them
Nineteenth century attempts to domesticate zebras were gimmicks – mere taming attempts. Any wild animal can be tamed, even tigers and lions. That is not the same as domestication. As seen above, domestication is a protracted process over many generations to transform wild animals into ones that can coexist with and be controlled by humans. Taming a zebra sufficiently to harness it to a cart does not domesticate it. We cannot take a wild zebra and expect to turn it into a domesticated horse-equivalent. Not even with a few generations of selective breeding. What we can do is take a herd of zebras, control their movement within a specific range, and cull them as a source of food. Over multiple generations, with selective breeding, killing the more jittery members before they mate and allowing the more docile ones to breed, we will steadily get more docile zebras.
Eventually, at some point, hundreds or thousands of years in the future, we might get zebras that are as docile as modern horses. However, there is no economic justification for such a long term investment in zebra domestication. Horses were not originally domesticated because people thought that someday, thousands of years in the future, their distant descendants will ride horses or use them to pull war chariots or wagons. They had an immediate utilitarian incentive: food. They wanted to eat horses, just like they ate sheep and cattle. Domesticating and herding them meant they could eat horses with less time and effort than it took to hunt them in the wild. Absent a similar economic and utilitarian incentive to domesticate and herd zebras, they will probably never get domesticated.
