This is what I call the “Jurassic Park Philosophy.” One of the things that really bugged me about that movie was its simplistic “herbivores good, carnivores bad” view of animals.
I guess all those bullfighters in Mexico and Spain have been fighting some rare kind of meat-eating bull…
Did you know the hippopotamus kills more people in Africa than any carnivore?
Definitely not argueing the core of your point, but being chased across a pasture by an irritable bull and being chased around a ring by a bull which one has just stabbed in the shoulder with a javelin differs a bit, don’t you think?
They’re extremely aggressive…they’ll tip/ram boats, trample people, etc. I just read somewhere that their yawn is actually a sign of anger, not boredom or sleepiness.
…Giraffes can stamp the crap out of a person and I’d say comfortably that a person has better luck running into a lion than an elephant in musth. (David Taylor’s books are a great follow up to James Herriot’s)
At any rate, zebras…
I always was told they weren’t rideable due to their backs not being strong enough to carry a human’s weight (noted the llama comment above)… I’d assume with the thick neck, short back and typical pot belly, it’d be one heck of a choppy uncomfortable ride anyway and I’d also understood that they were considered meat rather than transportation.
The second thing that comes to mind is that horses having been domesticated for literally thousands of years and only a few attempts on zebras, it could be that the local preditors are that much more aggressive and their prey instinct is stronger. Granted… watching one get chomped up by a crocodile on discovery, I wonder about that… at any rate… part of working with horses is working around the fact that they’re a natural prey animal and skittish about “vulnerable” areas, things that translate as “preditor” and death (horses will usually avoid an area where there’s a dead animal). So long after we’ve domesticated them, the prey issue still comes into the picture… I’d imagine with a zebra they’d be nearly impossible to deal with on a long term basis. Sure, you’ve got one or two exceptions, but over time, that’s not much.
I apologize if I’ve repeated something, feel free to dish out a sharp boot to the head if I’ve stepped on any toes.
Meg
from this page: Horses - Beyond Condition-Response - Equiworld - Equestrian Information on the internet
blah blah blah, blah blah blah and then:
Interesting regarding the different social structure.
Another source: WHAT ARE HYENAS LAUGHING AT, ANYWAY? by David Feldman…mentions that they’re aggressive. Kind of like people tend to think the koala bear is cute and cuddly, but instead it’s an ornery grump with nasty claws. 
Meg
No Cecil properly notes that it was in fact “invented” but not applied. Compton’s incorrectly says it was not invented.
Sure, Northern Europe was a wasteland.
In re Horses and Meg’s posting:
One of the items noted in both the cattle domestication research and the horse (which given present genetic evidence considered in the Science cite, appears to have been domesticated, seperately and independently, a rather large number of times) was the importance of social structure in re inserting humans into the same. It would appear Zebra on their own are less ideal candidates.
Re: Domestication of Horses, Dogs and Cats
mitochrondial DNA? re-socialisation? neoteny?
piffle.
I mean, really - you guys are just making it so complicated.
for the Straight Dope on this topic, read “The Cat Who Walked by Himself” in Kipling’s Just So Stories.
So, you’re suggesting that we should put the cart before the horse?
Ok, I’m not proud of that at all. But it was fun. Back to your regularly scheduled seriousness.
instead of wheaties this morning…
Since I’m easily confused, I seperated your two seperate statements in order to better figure out what the heck you’re saying. 
Ok, this is where I get lost: “was the importance of social structure in re inserting humans into the same” - are you saying in order to understand how to better domesticate the animal, they compared the animal’s social structure with that of humans’… or are you saying that they threw a man into a herd of cows to see if he’d do a Julie of the Wolves and eventually start grazing?
Ka-thunk… WOOF! :: cloud of dust shoots up::
Here are some links that you might find interesting:
http://www.le.ac.uk/biology/gat/equinet/scientists/levine.html - equiscience site - for more resources.
“family tree” and history of the horse
History of man’s relationship with horses and domestication
I always considered the term “domesticated” to indicate an animal that had been dominated and therefore trained to work for humans and some (dog, horse) had somewhere crossed over into “pet” and become a tradition. Leaving genetics and complicated discussions of mitochondria aside, all the animals that we’ve domesticated -especially those that have been domesticated the longest - are pack animals we’ve used for a purpose… cats are not domesticated, birds (aside from carrier pidgeon)…etc. So maybe this goes back to the point you were making earlier about “the importance of social structure in re inserting humans into the same”?
Lemme know if I got your point correctly…
Oh, given my above comment, regarding otters…Coffeecat, you might read “A Ring of Bright Water” for a view of what it’s like to have one as a pet.
Skunks do adapt really well as pets (I figure it was tongue in cheek, but I doubt the demand for pet skunks is enough to necessitate forced breeding & therefore engineering the scent glands out of them).
…my grandfather was a boy’s camp director in NE Ontario and my uncle made a point to adopt everything and anything he could get his hands on… so amoung the more “normal” stuff (like raccoons, etc.), they’ve had a porcupine, skunk and snowy owl at varying points in time. The porcupine apparantly was great. :rolleyes: who knew.
Part of a concern that should be noted is that skunks and raccoons are also rabies carriers and it might not be immediately apparant -so “adopting” wild pets is always a risk. “Dumb rabies” (also called Paralytic Rabies) is a non-aggressive form of rabies.
http://www.health.state.ri.us/disprev/communicable/rabies.htm
Oh, dogs being 2 meals away from wolves and wolves communing with humans… “socialized” is a far cry from “domesticated” (not saying this was your point, but pointing this out myself). Maybe the saying stands regarding survival instinct, but dogs and wolves so far seperated from the original that they’d be far less adaptable… a wolf can survive on it’s own in the wild and adapt to a variety of habitats, a feral dog has far, far less chance.
Meg
I often lapse into obscurity.
Ah, no.
What I meant, or rather the researchers meant, was that in order to achieve domestication humans have to be “inserted” into the social hierarchy of the animal. That’s the hypothesis in any case.
Take the example of the dog. Functionally the owner(s) or humans take on the rule of the permanent “dominant” members of the pack – for a dog we become uber-dominant dogs. That is dog pack hierarchy is adapted to human use.
The hypothesis is that one factor which may prevent effective domestication is a default social structure which is not welcoming (to some degree or another) of human “insertion” into it. E.g. solitary animals are not really domesticable. (The cat example might be an exception, but then cats really just hang around us and have a fairly parasitical relationship in truth)
So, the hypothesis in re cattle and horses (and other domesticates) is their non-domesticated precursor had a default social structure that was ammenable to the insertion of people into in some dominant role or another.
Ah, huh?
Interesting but the cites aren’t avail to me.
This one is a bit irrel insofar as is deal really with the stages leading up to modern equus whereas the research in question is more in regards to genetic evidence for various domestications (relatively concurrent) of flavors of modern equus.
I am a bit annoyed with the incorrect usage of “cro-magnon man” but nice general picture it would seem.
Ah, ok, so it is the human assuming the role of alpha. Gotcha.
my reaction to:
“Widespread Origins of Domestic Horse Lineages” 291 Science (5503) 474
I just found my citations in re the cattle issue:
C. Troy, D. Machugh, et al. “Genetic evidence for Near-Eastern origins of European cattle” Nature 410, 1088 - 1091 (2001)
Daniel G. Bradley, David E. MacHugh, et al.
“Mitochondrial diversity and the origins of African and European cattle” PNAS 1996 93: 5131-5135. "
The links were presented as not as part of arguement/debate or “proof,” as noted by “here are some links you might find interesting” rather than “here are some links you might find relevant” - my booboo.
Write them, set them straight. I don’t want to read misinformation any more than you do.
Meg
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond also cites the influence of East/West vs North/South orientation. Since it was the Aztecs that had toys with wheels and the Incas that had the llama, Diamond’s postulation seems to stand up in this case.
Anyone wishing to read the book will find that there are several reasons that most animals can’t be domesticated. It is not a simple question of their disposition or social hierarchy. That is why the argument of knowing someone with a pet skunk doesn’t count. I remember as a child that there were several trained seals around, but to domesticate them you’d need a very large pool and a source with lots of fish (this last is just humor folks).
Kiss my grits but I do believe that on this thread I agree with everything that Collounsbury has said or at least that part of what he said that I understood.
Got it, I was confused.
[qutoe]The links were presented as not as part of arguement/debate or “proof,” as noted by “here are some links you might find interesting” rather than “here are some links you might find relevant” - my booboo.
[/quote]
No, no, I wasn’t sure where the context was.
So, what I heard (when I was last in South Africa) was that you can train zebras fine, but you can’t train them to run past trees. This is supposedly an instinctual response to the fact that lions and such hide under trees.
UL?
Umm, these studies have been done, on DNA from quagga skins, and it turns out that the quagga is not a separate species, but rather IS/WAS a subspecies of another zebra species (plains?)based on genetic evidence. The upshot of this is that a project is underway to “reverse-breed” quagga from plains zebra - said project happening just up the road from me on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Cape Town.
Quagga differ from the main subspecies in having a light-brown coat with dark-brown stripes, a stripeless underbelly, and being a smaller size. I believe this project has been on the go for a good few years - the ones I’ve seen are already almost there in terms of the colouration and bellies, but are still the larger size. Exciting stuff!