The best time and place to come and see Zebras in their thousands is during the rainy season, as they travel between the Chobe River floodplains in Namibia and the grasslands of Botswana’s Makgadikgadi region 500 kilometres away. Their stripes are every bit as astonishing as they seemed when we were children, defying us to believe that they have not been patiently painted on by a skilled artist. Each example has a thick dorsal line running from the forehead to the tail, and branching stripes running downwards along the body except for where they arch and split over the front and rear legs. Every backside has its unique pattern, allowing their young to find their mother in the herd, while the collective shimmering of the lines confuses their most feared predators, the colour-blind lion and hyena, as well as providing protection from horseflies, which appear averse to landing on such complicated decoration. Zebras may share a common ancestry and profile with horses but they have none of the horse’s docility or desire to help us out, a factor which has changed history. It isn’t as if we haven’t tried to get them to pull our ploughs or carry our luggage. Every effort, however, has been comedically unsuccessful. In 1261, Sultan Baibar of Egypt sent a zebra to Alfonso X of Castile, which promptly threw the king off his back. In 1471, a zebra gifted by a Somalian king to the Emperor of China grew so unruly he had to be put down. The Germans tried to create a mounted zebra division in Namibia and lost ten men in the process. And in the late nineteenth century, the eccentric zoologist Walter Rothschild tied six of them to a carriage and attempted to drive to Buckingham Palace, but they broke free and escaped across the Hampshire countryside. Of all the 148 larger terrestrial herbivores, humans have only ever managed to domesticate five kinds: sheep, goats, cows (including oxen), pigs and horses. And we’ve had moderate local success with nine others: Arabian one-humped camels, Bactrian two-humped camels, llamas and alpacas, donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, Bali cattle, mithans and yaks. Crucially, not a single one of these fourteen was native to North America or Australia or sub-Saharan Africa, while South America had to make do with llamas and alpacas, who are not much good with ploughs and collapse quite easily when anyone tries to ride them. So the big, useful animals existed overwhelmingly only in Eurasia, and this is the single greatest reason why their societies were able to develop a great deal faster than others, and hence why some ended up colonised and others colonists. Without an animal to pull a plough and carry heavy things, there was – until the invention of steam power – a strict limit to possible development. It turns out, therefore, that the zebra’s refusal to help out humans was more or less directly responsible for the relative economic impoverishment of the regions in which it dwelt. We can, from a certain perspective, almost admire the zebra for its steadfastness; whatever the inducements, it was not going to make friends with us or tie its fate to our whims. Each one of us submits to so much, and often for no good reason, that we might take inspiration from this animal’s stubborn independence of mind. Zebras injure more zookeepers per year than tigers. They are impossible to lasso with a rope and have still never been successfully ridden any distance. There is a zebra inside each of us that might sometimes learn to resist sugar cubes and do more of its own thing.
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