Why not
Zebras are wild animals. The Smithsonian's National Zoo counts their untamable wild nature among what sets them apart from horses and donkeys. Its keepers trained a Grevy's zebra for his own health care without ever going into his enclosure while he was in it, because his temperament could change without warning and he could hurt someone by accident if he spooked, ran or kicked.
They kick and bite
A zebra's kick can seriously injure a lion, a hyena or a wild dog. Plains zebras are quick to fight, especially to bite, and kick out with their hind legs as they flee.
They never got used to people
A UC Davis study compared zebras and horses living around people and found the zebras far warier: they fled when a person was about 37 meters away, the horses at about 17. The authors suggest that wariness is part of why zebras resisted domestication. Another study links that failure to the stress collapse, called capture myopathy, that zebras can suffer when they are caught.
People have tried
In the late 1800s Europeans in Africa tried zebras as transport and draft animals, hoping they would resist the tsetse fly and horse sickness, and gave up over the zebras' shorter stamina and then the arrival of motor vehicles. In German East Africa around 1900, Bronsart von Schellendorff promised to tame zebras and cross them with horses into a new draft animal, the zebroid.
In England, Walter Rothschild had zebras trained to pull a carriage, which the Natural History Museum says he was even invited to drive to the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Pulling a carriage is not the same as carrying a rider.
Rubs's story
Rubs, the one zebra at Kaleidoscope Desert, is why we feel strongly about this. He was rescued from a hunting safari park in Texas. When he was about a year old, videos of a man riding him around a pen spread online, and people all over the country reached out to us asking for help.
Nobody rides him here. He lives with his herd, the six mini horses and two mini donkeys, and is admired from the ground, on his own terms.
Kaleidoscope Desert is a nonprofit art and animal sanctuary on 7.5 acres in Morongo Valley, California, 15 minutes from Joshua Tree and 20 minutes from Palm Springs, where more than 100 animals roam free among the art.
You meet them on the Sanctuary Tour, a guided walk of about 90 minutes that runs daily, with someone who knows every resident by name and their stories. The animals come over on their own terms. Every visit is for adults, 18 and over.
100% of proceeds go to the animals: their rescue, their care, and the sanctuary they live in. Kaleidoscope Desert Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.