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

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9691.full

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?

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.

You're probably right, given enough time zebras could probably be domesticated.

But perhaps there are some animals that just cannot be domesticated at all? As there seems to be some social/mental bond required, you'd be hard-pressed to find a scientist who'd claim domestication of insects was possible, the species-gap between us and them is just too big. So where is the line to be drawn?

We say wheat is domesticated. I just think it means weaved into the fabric of society. Brains are not necessary, but mutual benefits is.

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-bes...

The catch is that friendly foxes don't look that foxy anymore; friendly zebras might lose their stripes at which point they kinda look like donkeys

That is entirely possible of course. But if that was the case, you could get a hell of a paper out of it by proving the genes responsible for coloration were tied to domestication.

I'm afraid Darwin already published on how domestication syndrome involves pleiotropy in coloration changes, especially to piebaldness (which did indeed also happen to some degree in the domesticated foxes despite being selected solely based on behavior), so he has priority there by 2 centuries or so.

They look a lot like wild foxes to me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox