Why Were Zebras Never Domesticated? Temperament and History

Taming is not the same as domesticating

It helps to separate two ideas. Taming means getting one wild animal used to people, often by raising it from a young age. Domestication is a much longer process, over many generations, in which people choose which animals breed, so that the whole population becomes calmer, easier to handle and useful to humans.

The horse and the donkey went through this process thousands of years ago. The donkey was domesticated in northeast Africa roughly 7,000 years ago, and genetic studies suggest that modern domestic horses spread from the western Eurasian steppes a little over 4,000 years ago. Zebras, which share the same genus, Equus, never followed.

What makes zebras so hard to handle?

Zebras evolved on African grasslands alongside lions, hyenas, leopards, wild dogs and crocodiles, and also alongside human hunters for hundreds of thousands of years. Animals that survived there were the ones that reacted fast and fought hard.

Several traits make zebras difficult partners:

• A strong flight response. Zebras startle easily and bolt at sudden movements, which is dangerous for a rider or for a cart on a road.
• Powerful bites and kicks. Zebras defend themselves with teeth and hooves. Stallions fight each other by biting at the neck and legs and kicking, and they use the same weapons against predators.
• Unpredictability with age. Zebras raised by people often become harder, not easier, to handle as they mature, especially stallions.
• Wariness. Zebras have sharp senses and are hard to catch and restrain. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond wrote that zebras are notorious for biting and that they are very hard to lasso because they watch the rope and duck away.

None of this means zebras are “evil.” These traits are excellent survival tools for a wild grazer, but they are the opposite of what people need from a working animal.

Diamond’s checklist for domestication

Jared Diamond popularized the idea that a large mammal must pass several tests before it can be domesticated. It must eat food that is easy to supply, grow reasonably fast, breed willingly in captivity, have a manageable disposition, stay calm when penned, and live in a social structure that people can take over.

Zebras pass several of these tests. They eat grass, grow quickly and breed in zoos. But Diamond argued that they fail badly on disposition and on their tendency to panic. He used zebras as a prime example of his “Anna Karenina principle”: a domestic animal must have every one of the right traits, and failing on just one is enough to rule a species out.

Not every scientist agrees with every detail of Diamond’s argument, and some point out that early people in Africa already had donkeys and cattle, so there was less pressure to work on zebras. Still, the basic point about temperament is widely accepted.

Attempts to tame zebras through history

People have tried to put zebras to work many times:

• Ancient Rome. Records suggest that zebras, called hippotigris or “horse-tigers,” pulled chariots in arena games from the time of Emperor Caracalla, in the early 3rd century AD.
• Royal gifts. Zebras were sent as diplomatic presents to rulers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East for centuries. A zebra given to Queen Charlotte of Britain in 1762 drew crowds in London and gained a reputation for kicking at visitors.
• Walter Rothschild. In the late 19th century, the wealthy British zoologist trained zebras to pull a carriage and drove it to Buckingham Palace, a famous publicity stunt that proved it was possible with great effort.
• Colonial Africa. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, settlers and German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for riding and draft work, partly hoping they would cope better with local diseases that killed imported horses. The results were limited and the programs faded away.

These cases show that individual zebras can be trained by skilled handlers. What never happened was a lasting breeding program that produced calm, dependable zebras generation after generation.

Could zebras be domesticated in the future?

In theory, many generations of careful selective breeding might produce calmer zebras, as happened with foxes in a famous Russian experiment that selected for tameness. In practice, there is little reason to try. Horses and donkeys already do the same jobs, and zebras are more valuable as wild animals that draw tourists to African parks.

Zebras in zoos are still treated as wild animals, and keepers handle them with the same caution as other large, unpredictable hoofed mammals. Zebras can breed with horses and donkeys in captivity to produce zorses and zonkeys, but like the mule, these hybrids are usually sterile, so they cannot found a new domestic breed. Donkey vs mule explains how such crosses work.

Zebras compared with horses

For more on the wild species, see the plains zebra profile, and for the zebra’s main escape strategy, read How fast can a zebra run?