In their current state they are impractical.
But if all Horses dissappeared one day, we could easily make efforts to selectively breed a new species of Zebra descended Equine that takes on the Horses role and DOESN'T ape out on you.
*as much, modern horses still kill people that mess with them.
There was a brief period during the colonisation of Africa when white people were around zebras and hadn't yet developed ways to keep domestic horses healthy in that environment or developed the infrastructure enough to introduce significant mechanisation, and the idea of using zebras was seriously considered. Other zebra tamings were mostly for the gimmick but in German East Africa before the first world war they put an actual effort into making zebras a viable working animal, partly by taming wild ones and partly by crossbreeding them with horses, hoping to get the zebra's resilience to African diseases and the horse's strength and temperament to express in the hybrid. Iirc it kind of fizzled out as the political and technological situation just moved on before they really made serious progress.
There's a lot of excuse making revisionism floating around trying to defend Africans from never having tamed the zebra, mostly pointing to the presence of large predators and hostile conditions in Africa as a reason for zebras to be particularly aggressive and panicky and thus unsuited to domestication, but I don't see any reason to think that central Eurasian horse ancestors wouldn't also face those pressures thousands of years ago and have similarly flighty temperaments to zebras before humans started selectively breeding them in the bronze age. It takes time. There are extant wild horses in central Asia that, like zebras, can be tamed but haven't been domesticated.
Why are we even surprised that an animal wasn't domesticated? Domestication is an extreme exception. Out of millions of species people only domesticated maybe 12. Statistically, zebras are undomesticable, just like most species.
And when an animal is tame enough, people would have just hunted them into extinction, just like most of Eurasian large fauna.
Similarly, people wrongly see civilizational advances as things that naturally just happen over time and it's weird when some cultures don't achieve them. In reality, it's the other way around. Most people never invent anything, never domesticate any animals etc. What happens is that a tiny minority of people do, and became so successful that they subjugate most of their neighbors, thus spreading their technology. The only neighbors they don't subjugate are the ones that adopt these advancements, further spreading that tech.
>Out of millions of species people only domesticated maybe 12.
midwit statement, humans weren't trying to "domesticate" tree frogs and sea slugs
2 months ago
Anonymous
Even if you limit it to species that are potentially worth domesticating, the number is low. Once it had been done, once chickens had been domesticated for example, it would be pointless to start the process again with partridges or grouse or some other wildfowl. Some separate domestications arose in different regions, like the New World crops, but mostly it was possible to stick with already domesticated species to meet your immediate needs, rather than embark on the generations long process of domesticating something new.
Something to add to this is that, for most of history, subsaharan Africa was pretty remote and largely isolated from the big contiguous human civilisation of the Eurasian continent and Mediterranean popularly known as the 'Old World'. Most of the world's population and most of human progress was within the Old World and dark Africa was physically separated from it by large distances over land and sea, desert and wilderness just like the Americas and Australia were, albeit to a lesser extent. French people or Japanese or Kurds didn't tame horses any more than Africans tamed zebras, but they were part of the cultural continuum that did produce those advances and so had access to them and developed them. Much of Africa is bumfrick shitkicker land even today, and historically didn't inherit the thousands of years long process of advances of which animal husbandry is part.
No. Zebras are actually weak as frick in the mid back and unfit to be even a pack animal. The best you can do is cross them with a horse, but the resulting offspring is always sterile so you can't select for any specific traits over generations. You're just repeatedly rolling the dice on an individual basis. It is impractical.
they say it happened in the horn of Africa and therefore assume the Black is responsible but that conclusion is not supported by common sense. Obviously it was whites who are God's people and the only ones who have been blessed with the capacity for the task.
Donkeys are derived from a species of wild equid endemic to East Africa, in what was once called Nubia. Pastoralism is the traditional way of life there and they would have had domestic animals from the middle east like goats and cattle via the Nile and/or Red Sea, so the concept wasn't necessarily developed independently there.
All that for a pretty pic at best lmao.
there is no reason zebras can't be used for productive work by any of God's people.
In their current state they are impractical.
But if all Horses dissappeared one day, we could easily make efforts to selectively breed a new species of Zebra descended Equine that takes on the Horses role and DOESN'T ape out on you.
*as much, modern horses still kill people that mess with them.
>ape out on you
skill issue
Is domestication of the zebra underway? Never heard of anyone trying it.
realistically not really, its mostly a gimmick of some tammed zebras they have
There was a brief period during the colonisation of Africa when white people were around zebras and hadn't yet developed ways to keep domestic horses healthy in that environment or developed the infrastructure enough to introduce significant mechanisation, and the idea of using zebras was seriously considered. Other zebra tamings were mostly for the gimmick but in German East Africa before the first world war they put an actual effort into making zebras a viable working animal, partly by taming wild ones and partly by crossbreeding them with horses, hoping to get the zebra's resilience to African diseases and the horse's strength and temperament to express in the hybrid. Iirc it kind of fizzled out as the political and technological situation just moved on before they really made serious progress.
There's a lot of excuse making revisionism floating around trying to defend Africans from never having tamed the zebra, mostly pointing to the presence of large predators and hostile conditions in Africa as a reason for zebras to be particularly aggressive and panicky and thus unsuited to domestication, but I don't see any reason to think that central Eurasian horse ancestors wouldn't also face those pressures thousands of years ago and have similarly flighty temperaments to zebras before humans started selectively breeding them in the bronze age. It takes time. There are extant wild horses in central Asia that, like zebras, can be tamed but haven't been domesticated.
Why are we even surprised that an animal wasn't domesticated? Domestication is an extreme exception. Out of millions of species people only domesticated maybe 12. Statistically, zebras are undomesticable, just like most species.
And when an animal is tame enough, people would have just hunted them into extinction, just like most of Eurasian large fauna.
Similarly, people wrongly see civilizational advances as things that naturally just happen over time and it's weird when some cultures don't achieve them. In reality, it's the other way around. Most people never invent anything, never domesticate any animals etc. What happens is that a tiny minority of people do, and became so successful that they subjugate most of their neighbors, thus spreading their technology. The only neighbors they don't subjugate are the ones that adopt these advancements, further spreading that tech.
>Out of millions of species people only domesticated maybe 12.
midwit statement, humans weren't trying to "domesticate" tree frogs and sea slugs
Even if you limit it to species that are potentially worth domesticating, the number is low. Once it had been done, once chickens had been domesticated for example, it would be pointless to start the process again with partridges or grouse or some other wildfowl. Some separate domestications arose in different regions, like the New World crops, but mostly it was possible to stick with already domesticated species to meet your immediate needs, rather than embark on the generations long process of domesticating something new.
Something to add to this is that, for most of history, subsaharan Africa was pretty remote and largely isolated from the big contiguous human civilisation of the Eurasian continent and Mediterranean popularly known as the 'Old World'. Most of the world's population and most of human progress was within the Old World and dark Africa was physically separated from it by large distances over land and sea, desert and wilderness just like the Americas and Australia were, albeit to a lesser extent. French people or Japanese or Kurds didn't tame horses any more than Africans tamed zebras, but they were part of the cultural continuum that did produce those advances and so had access to them and developed them. Much of Africa is bumfrick shitkicker land even today, and historically didn't inherit the thousands of years long process of advances of which animal husbandry is part.
No. Zebras are actually weak as frick in the mid back and unfit to be even a pack animal. The best you can do is cross them with a horse, but the resulting offspring is always sterile so you can't select for any specific traits over generations. You're just repeatedly rolling the dice on an individual basis. It is impractical.
No since it's useless now that we have cars
If white people had been in Africa for thousands of years however, zebra would be domesticated
>God gave man dominion over the animals
So why did Africans fail to gain dominion over the Zebra?
Not sure, but they are credited with domesticating the donkey
Sounds like bullcrap.
they say it happened in the horn of Africa and therefore assume the Black is responsible but that conclusion is not supported by common sense. Obviously it was whites who are God's people and the only ones who have been blessed with the capacity for the task.
Donkeys are derived from a species of wild equid endemic to East Africa, in what was once called Nubia. Pastoralism is the traditional way of life there and they would have had domestic animals from the middle east like goats and cattle via the Nile and/or Red Sea, so the concept wasn't necessarily developed independently there.