Zebras and horses belong to the equine family in species, and they are also very good at running; Horses have been successfully domesticated all over the world for a long time, but zebras have never been tamed by humans. Today we will briefly explore this problem.
Are zebras horses?
The answer is yes. Zebras and horses are animals of the same order and family, and they both belong to the equine genus of the genus Equine of the order Chithromedae, while the difference is that zebras belong to a different subgenus of the genus Equine - the subgenus Zebra. So, from a macro point of view, zebras are actually horses. However, from the perspective of subdivision, there is still a difference between zebra and horse, after all, the subgenera are different.
So, what is the reason why zebras cannot be domesticated?
Zebra fighting a lion
Around 40,000 to 4.7 million years ago, zebras and horses gradually differentiated from their common ancestors and adapted to their respective habitats. In the primitive social stage of mankind, the wild horse herds in North America and Europe were raised by people as edible animals, and over time, humans slowly became familiar with the various habits of horses; About 12,000 years ago, after the advent of primitive agriculture, people gradually discovered the importance of horses in transportation and warfare, so humans began to invest time and energy in the horse herd to selectively breed the most tame individuals and use them to breed offspring. Over time, horses were completely domesticated by humans.
Zebra fighting leopards
But unlike wild horses, zebras, which live in the vast savannahs of Africa, are plagued by too many predators and predators, including ferocious lions, lightning cheetahs and cunning hyenas. Thus, natural selection has shaped zebras into responsive and extremely sensitive animals that flee as soon as there are signs of danger, even the slightest. As a result, zebras are particularly aggressive and resist the character of being caught. It also created a zebra's attack power that was not commensurate with its own physique, and there were even records of zebras killing the attacking lion with a counter-kick.
A fight between zebras
In the process of catching zebras, it was also found that zebras have very fast and coherent dodging reflexes, which makes it extremely difficult for people to catch zebras with lasso or other methods, and in addition, unlike the social wild horses, which have a structured order, zebras do not have a family structure or hierarchy, which is one of the main factors that zebras cannot be tamed by humans.
Although people soon recognized these very unfriendly qualities of zebras to humans, they still tried to domesticate zebras.
Rothschild rides in a zebra / Image: Tibi Puiu (zmescience)
In the 19th century, for example, because New Zealand Governor George Gray liked to ride in horse-drawn carriages moved by wild African zebras, he imported a convoy of zebras from South Africa into New Zealand and tamed them. The British zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) once drove a horse-drawn carriage by a zebra to Buckingham Palace.
However, these are just a few successful examples of individuals with zebras tamed. Overall, people did their best to tame zebras, but it turned out that zebras could not be domesticated because of their "too stubborn personality". They like to live their lives the way they want, after all, zebras have a deep African predator in their genes.
The author | Li Xin
Source| selected works submitted by the Second Science Popularization Essay Contest in Zhengzhou
The views | the statement are solely those of the author and do not represent the position of this number