Striped Hubris: The Disastrous Victorian Crusade to Domesticate the African Zebra

During the height of 19th-century European imperialism, colonizers in Africa faced a massive logistical nightmare: their imported horses and draft animals were being rapidly decimated by the tsetse fly. In a spectacular display of Victorian arrogance, they decided the solution was simple—they would simply domesticate the native zebra.

What followed was a decades-long, spectacularly disastrous attempt to bend an untamable species to the human will. Unlike horses, which evolved a herd hierarch...