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But, breaking an animal is not the same as domesticating an animal. As noted on page 159: "Elephants have been tamed, but never domesticated. Hannibal's elephants were, and Asian work elephants are, just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they were not bred in captivity. In contrast, a domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal's breeding and food supply."
And of course to this day zebras have not been domesticated.
Sure that is a story. But being breakable is easily translatable to domestication so long as breeding isn't a problem. There is no evidence that, for example, Bison or zebras don't breed when put into fences.
If livestock is breakable + breedable, it is maximally easy to domesticate, so long as you have a long timespan outlook. Pigs are seemingly unbreakable and were still domesticated. Under the Diamond theory of the world, pigs would be an order of magnitude harder to domesticate than zebras.
It isn't a story. It is the definition he uses, and very much the standard one
You are the one who brought up breakability as a criterion, not Diamond, nor I. It sure seems to me that if pigs are unbreakable yet domesticated, then the natural conclusion is that breakability is not required for domestication. And breaking a horse "refers to the process used by humans to get horses to let themselves be ridden or harnessed." What does that have to do with how humans use pigs? Or chickens? Or most other domestic animals?
Breaking being used by me as a synonym for taming. One of the main points of a domestication program is to breed tamer traits while not breeding wilder, more rambunctious individuals. Zebras have a decently long reproductive period (similar to horses) which makes the program more ambitious than a dog, cat, or chicken taming process, but considering how easily manipulated they were by Europeans, and how they love to bump uglies it indicates that either:
Domesticating zebras would have been easily done by whoever domesticated horses; or
Domestication of zebras was actually partially done, and the modern zebra is a 50/50 (or so) hybrid wild-type/domesticated animal, similar to how no truly wild type aurochs have existed for millennia.
Yes, I know. The point is that taming is not domestication. Taming is done to an individual animal. Domestication is done to a species. The fact that one can tame an individual animal says nothing about whether one can, through artificial selection, engineer an animal with naturally tame traits.
The definition you gave earlier yourself says nothing about tameness, only about human interest, and another person already showed you that we did change zebras from their wild variant.
I was specifically responding to the following statement by anti_dan: "One of the main points of a domestication program is to breed tamer traits while not breeding wilder, more rambunctious individuals."
Which person was that?
Well, it seems like the correct response was to point out that even breeding a more aggressive variant still counts as domestication, if this is what you wanted to accomplish.
Esperanza
Why would I say that, when my point was that his statement, "Zebras can be trained to be tame" says nothing about whether zebras can be domesticated?
? Esperanza makes an unsupported claim that "Zebras have been modified by being bred in captivity," and then goes on to conflate taming with domestication. His one concrete ostensible example, Lord Rothschild, is specifically mentioned by Diamond on page 171 of my edition, as an example of what domestication is not.
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