Photos Show That People Were Riding Zebras In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries

A new photo archive by Vintag.es shows that some of the European colonizers penetrating Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries were riding wild zebras as an alternative to horses.

The reason behind it is the zebra's resistance to diseases carried by tsetse flies which made their domestication more attractive.

However, as many European colonizers learned in the early 20th century, despite their similarity to horses, zebras are just a bit too wild to completely tame.

Unlike horses, which naturally roam around munching on grass, zebras spend their lives cagily watching, evading and fighting savannah predators such as lions, cheetahs and crocodiles. Natural selection has bred zebras to be nervous, flighty and brutally aggressive if cornered.

But taming individual zebras to perform horse-like duties has occasionally been successful. Lord Walter Rothschild, for instance, trained a team of zebras to pull a carriage, which he drove past Buckingham Palace to demonstrate their supposedly pliable nature.

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In the year 1898, in one of the many mews just off Cromwell Road, Kensington, lived Mr. Hardy, who was a noted horserider and trainer, being one of the three men who had succeeded in riding the “French Rocking Horse”.

This was a device used by the French Cavalry. It had every possible movement of a wild horse not in the best of tempers.

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Mr. Hardy with zebra coach in London, 1898.

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Lord Walter Rothschild with his team of carriage-pulling zebras, 1895. Rothschild, of the global Rothschild banking family, owned his own zoo.

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Carriage drawn by a zebra driven by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, founder of the Natural History Museum at Tring, now part of the Natural History Museum, London.

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A zebra cart, 1890s

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Mrs. Alice Hayes herself, as may be supposed, looks every inch a ‘workman’ in the saddle, 1890s.

Here, she rode a zebra at Calcutta which was broken within an hour by her husband sufficiently to be saddled and bridled.

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A German soldier is riding a zebra in Zanzibar, 1890s.

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A zebra pulls a carriage in Calcutta, India, 1930.

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Mrs. Martin Johnson rides a domesticated zebra named Bromar, 1923

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A zebra pulls a carriage through Brxton, London, 1913

It is likely that the zebra and carriage were the property of music hall artist, Mr. Gustav-Grais, and were used to promote his shows.

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Laffin Leslie, an 18-year-old dwarf, guides Jimmy, the “only rideable zebra in the world,” across a road in Berkshire, England, 1935.

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Zebra team with man and cart in Golden Gate Park, 1925.

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