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Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts (2014)

44 points by jkuria 9y ago

rectang 9y ago
A horse is a massive mountain of muscle. It's thrilling to have one work with you and for you because of their power, but when things go wrong (like a horse falling on you), you will be caught up in something your comparatively weak hairless ape body can't counter forcefully. The idea of hitching such a monstrosity to a skittish and ornery personality...
- krono 9y ago
  Meanwhile I see every type of person from teenage girl to greying men texting/looking at their phone at 130 km/h in their aluminium box on wheels on a daily basis. Humans...
  - Rumudiez 9y ago
    I think this is a pretty fair point. Cars are incredibly dangerous to others and many drivers completely disregard that. A 5-star safety rating doesn't mean anything to the pedestrian or cyclist in front of you, but people tend to act like it's no big deal since they themselves are unlikely to be seriously injured. Risk homeostasis or risk compensation explains this behavior quite well, and I believe it's a very damaging affliction on our car-centric society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
    - perl4ever 9y ago
      Before cars, when horses were the typical mode of transportation, they were quite dangerous too. I haven't done research to quantify it, but I've noticed while reading random articles on historical people in Wikipedia, that quite a few died falling off a horse. Even in modern times, the few people who ride horses often have accidents - I bet you can name a famous one without looking it up...
    - avar 9y ago
      > A 5-star safety rating doesn't > mean anything to the pedestrian > or cyclist in front of you[...] It does, the Euro NCAP now includes pedestrian and cyclist safety in their assessments[1]. 1. https://www.euroncap.com/en/press-media/press-releases/new-leaf-charging-ahead-with-5-star-result-in-toughest-safety-tests-to-date/ https://www.euroncap.com/en/press-media/press-releases/new-l...
- mlevental 9y ago
  >weak hairless ape body lol i get your drift but i don't see what hair has to do with it (unless we're all biblical samson)
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    I think he meant the phrase "hairless ape" to be parsed together, to indicate human. Not a ((weak, hairless, ape) body) but a ((weak, hairless-ape) body)
    - mlevental 9y ago
      I get it but aren't there hairless apes that are very strong? I just meant it's the wrong poetic flourish
      - pilsetnieks 9y ago
        The only references I can find to hairless apes (that aren't humans) are chimp that are either shaved or have alopecia.
    - rectang 9y ago
      Yeah... It's a phrase from my youth. I thought I was channeling Douglas Adams or something like that. Turns out to have been Howard the Duck comics. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hairless%20Ape https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hairless%20A...
gweinberg 9y ago
I think maybe you could if you bred from the most human-friendly zebras yo could find for a century or so. But nobody has really tried that, people are so impatient these days.
- improbable22 9y ago
  How many centuries did it take us to donesticate horses? Probably quite a few... The only argument offered for the Why in the title is this one: > Moreover, zebras have evolved alongside man, whereas European animals mostly evolved in the absence of man (we didn’t migrate out of Africa until relatively recently). Yet clearly we weren’t such a shock to the horse’s ancestors that we simply ate them all... as we did everything in the Americas. Maybe because of earlier proto-humans? So is this some kind of goldilocks argument?
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    Evidence is that horses were domesticated (on the Eurasian Steppe) for meat and milk before they were ever ridden. So you're probably right that the behaviours that made them docile enough to ride emerged over quite a long time.
- defen 9y ago
  All domestic horses today are descended from a tiny number of stallions (possibly even just 1). So maybe we just haven't gotten lucky yet in finding a super-tame male zebra from which to breed domesticates. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1326 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1326 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9691.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9691.full
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Absolutely, and the fox experiments[1] suggest 40 generations is sufficient. You just have to breed them for it on a consistent basis. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-best-friend-a-forgotten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-bes...
gwern 9y ago
A very silly argument. Breaking some zebras for a carriage proves nothing about domestication. You know what kind of creatures hate humans, snap and bite, have zero herd or group instincts, are easily agitated, are smaller than their closest comparable domesticated species, intensely paranoid because fragile, and lash out when cornered? Russian foxes. But it took less than a human lifetime to domesticate them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox) and now they're sold as pets and reportedly are even friendlier than most cats. That is what a proper breeding program, done systematically with a breeding population of hundreds or thousands, with due attention to reliable measurements, heritability, and constant stringent selection, can do over several decades. (It would be even easier now with the advent of marker-assisted selection as GWASes increasingly turn up the genetic signatures of selection for domestication in cats/dogs/rabbit/foxes/etc.) A few small-scale failures by some dilettantes back in the 1800s which aren't even described can't be considered strong evidence. If no one is doing it, that says more about priorities and the substitution of automobiles and insecticides than about whether it is doable or not. (If maize didn't already exist, would anyone bother trying to breed teosinte into corn, rather than working more on wheat or soy or rice cultivars? The foxes were a scientific research project, after all, no one actually needed a dog replacement...) A more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses.
- cobbzilla 9y ago
  Agreed. The very title conflates taming with domestication, two totally different things.
- iamwil 9y ago
  Your last question was touched upon in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"--though I don't remember the book giving a reason, other than, if it was easy to domesticate [presumably compared to domesticating an alternative species, or just getting other humans to do the work], people would have done so by now.
  - 9y ago
graycat 9y ago
Okay: In the debate between nature and nurture, we tend to assume that behavior is mostly from nurture, not nature. I've wondered about that assumption. So, from the OP, quite deeply zebra behavior is from nature, that is, genetics, "hard wired" as the OP says, and is quite solid since a lot of nurture won't change it. So, in the nature versus nurture debate, with zebras we have a good benchmark: Deep parts of behavior can be from nature and beyond nurture. So, we need to consider that possibility for species other than zebras. That is, even in behavior, quite generally we need to question the efficacy of nurture.
- dfaigonio 9y ago
  It's not at all controversial that there's a strong genetic component to personality. There are people who like to pretend otherwise, but it's very well-established science.
crunchlibrarian 9y ago
I like how this page's auto-hiding header keeps jumping around and rescrolling the page making it impossible to read the first two paragraphs. How did the web get this bad?
- Synaesthesia 9y ago
  On my iPhone it simply showed a picture which covered the text and refused to move. Thankfully reader mode allowed me to read the article, thought the same thing as you - how did we get to this point?
amarant 9y ago
Interesting read, somehow reminds me a bit about that old Swedish king who thought he'd train moose for his cavalry.. Didn't work out to well either, but for different reasons.. Found a link about it, if anyone's interested: http://stockholm.headsaflamemedia.com/2014/03/08/in-the-1700s-the-swedish-cavalry-experimented-with-moose/ http://stockholm.headsaflamemedia.com/2014/03/08/in-the-1700...

44 points by jkuria 9y ago

A horse is a massive mountain of muscle. It's thrilling to have one work with you and for you because of their power, but when things go wrong (like a horse falling on you), you will be caught up in something your comparatively weak hairless ape body can't counter forcefully. The idea of hitching such a monstrosity to a skittish and ornery personality...

krono 9y ago
Meanwhile I see every type of person from teenage girl to greying men texting/looking at their phone at 130 km/h in their aluminium box on wheels on a daily basis. Humans...
- Rumudiez 9y ago
  I think this is a pretty fair point. Cars are incredibly dangerous to others and many drivers completely disregard that. A 5-star safety rating doesn't mean anything to the pedestrian or cyclist in front of you, but people tend to act like it's no big deal since they themselves are unlikely to be seriously injured. Risk homeostasis or risk compensation explains this behavior quite well, and I believe it's a very damaging affliction on our car-centric society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    Before cars, when horses were the typical mode of transportation, they were quite dangerous too. I haven't done research to quantify it, but I've noticed while reading random articles on historical people in Wikipedia, that quite a few died falling off a horse. Even in modern times, the few people who ride horses often have accidents - I bet you can name a famous one without looking it up...
  - avar 9y ago
    > A 5-star safety rating doesn't > mean anything to the pedestrian > or cyclist in front of you[...] It does, the Euro NCAP now includes pedestrian and cyclist safety in their assessments[1]. 1. https://www.euroncap.com/en/press-media/press-releases/new-leaf-charging-ahead-with-5-star-result-in-toughest-safety-tests-to-date/ https://www.euroncap.com/en/press-media/press-releases/new-l...
mlevental 9y ago
>weak hairless ape body lol i get your drift but i don't see what hair has to do with it (unless we're all biblical samson)
- pilsetnieks 9y ago
  I think he meant the phrase "hairless ape" to be parsed together, to indicate human. Not a ((weak, hairless, ape) body) but a ((weak, hairless-ape) body)
  - mlevental 9y ago
    I get it but aren't there hairless apes that are very strong? I just meant it's the wrong poetic flourish
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      The only references I can find to hairless apes (that aren't humans) are chimp that are either shaved or have alopecia.
  - rectang 9y ago
    Yeah... It's a phrase from my youth. I thought I was channeling Douglas Adams or something like that. Turns out to have been Howard the Duck comics. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hairless%20Ape https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hairless%20A...

gweinberg 9y ago

I think maybe you could if you bred from the most human-friendly zebras yo could find for a century or so. But nobody has really tried that, people are so impatient these days.

improbable22 9y ago
How many centuries did it take us to donesticate horses? Probably quite a few... The only argument offered for the Why in the title is this one: > Moreover, zebras have evolved alongside man, whereas European animals mostly evolved in the absence of man (we didn’t migrate out of Africa until relatively recently). Yet clearly we weren’t such a shock to the horse’s ancestors that we simply ate them all... as we did everything in the Americas. Maybe because of earlier proto-humans? So is this some kind of goldilocks argument?
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Evidence is that horses were domesticated (on the Eurasian Steppe) for meat and milk before they were ever ridden. So you're probably right that the behaviours that made them docile enough to ride emerged over quite a long time.
defen 9y ago
All domestic horses today are descended from a tiny number of stallions (possibly even just 1). So maybe we just haven't gotten lucky yet in finding a super-tame male zebra from which to breed domesticates. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1326 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1326 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9691.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9691.full
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Absolutely, and the fox experiments[1] suggest 40 generations is sufficient. You just have to breed them for it on a consistent basis. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-best-friend-a-forgotten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-bes...

gwern 9y ago

A very silly argument. Breaking some zebras for a carriage proves nothing about domestication. You know what kind of creatures hate humans, snap and bite, have zero herd or group instincts, are easily agitated, are smaller than their closest comparable domesticated species, intensely paranoid because fragile, and lash out when cornered? Russian foxes. But it took less than a human lifetime to domesticate them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox) and now they're sold as pets and reportedly are even friendlier than most cats. That is what a proper breeding program, done systematically with a breeding population of hundreds or thousands, with due attention to reliable measurements, heritability, and constant stringent selection, can do over several decades. (It would be even easier now with the advent of marker-assisted selection as GWASes increasingly turn up the genetic signatures of selection for domestication in cats/dogs/rabbit/foxes/etc.) A few small-scale failures by some dilettantes back in the 1800s which aren't even described can't be considered strong evidence. If no one is doing it, that says more about priorities and the substitution of automobiles and insecticides than about whether it is doable or not. (If maize didn't already exist, would anyone bother trying to breed teosinte into corn, rather than working more on wheat or soy or rice cultivars? The foxes were a scientific research project, after all, no one actually needed a dog replacement...) A more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses.

cobbzilla 9y ago
Agreed. The very title conflates taming with domestication, two totally different things.
iamwil 9y ago
Your last question was touched upon in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"--though I don't remember the book giving a reason, other than, if it was easy to domesticate [presumably compared to domesticating an alternative species, or just getting other humans to do the work], people would have done so by now.
- 9y ago

graycat 9y ago

Okay: In the debate between nature and nurture, we tend to assume that behavior is mostly from nurture, not nature. I've wondered about that assumption. So, from the OP, quite deeply zebra behavior is from nature, that is, genetics, "hard wired" as the OP says, and is quite solid since a lot of nurture won't change it. So, in the nature versus nurture debate, with zebras we have a good benchmark: Deep parts of behavior can be from nature and beyond nurture. So, we need to consider that possibility for species other than zebras. That is, even in behavior, quite generally we need to question the efficacy of nurture.

dfaigonio 9y ago
It's not at all controversial that there's a strong genetic component to personality. There are people who like to pretend otherwise, but it's very well-established science.

crunchlibrarian 9y ago

I like how this page's auto-hiding header keeps jumping around and rescrolling the page making it impossible to read the first two paragraphs. How did the web get this bad?

Synaesthesia 9y ago
On my iPhone it simply showed a picture which covered the text and refused to move. Thankfully reader mode allowed me to read the article, thought the same thing as you - how did we get to this point?

amarant 9y ago

Interesting read, somehow reminds me a bit about that old Swedish king who thought he'd train moose for his cavalry.. Didn't work out to well either, but for different reasons.. Found a link about it, if anyone's interested: http://stockholm.headsaflamemedia.com/2014/03/08/in-the-1700s-the-swedish-cavalry-experimented-with-moose/ http://stockholm.headsaflamemedia.com/2014/03/08/in-the-1700...