Ohio man hospitalized after "pet" zebra nearly bites off his arm

In a most Ohio ending, everybody goes home happy, expect the zebra.

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https://greennews.ie/how-animals-shaped-the-evolution-of-humans/

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Humans can be stupid anywhere!

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That goes both ways, so it’s all good.

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Possibly the first and last species to be domesticated, and both carnivores, and yet, as you say, they share our homes.

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It is entirely possible that you may have won todays internet. :wink:

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“I’m trying only to shoot it in alternate stripes, but the bastard keeps moving.”

A relative who wrote a book about circuses told me that one circus she’d studied had an act that featured trained zebras. It was, however, a “liberty act”, which is one in which the animals aren’t mounted by a rider or controlled with reins – they respond only to verbal commands. Zebras’ reputation for being ornery fuckers is so well-established that even circus performers didn’t want to mess with them.

In Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel,” he says that sub-Saharan Africans really drew the short straw when it came to domesticable animals: zebras instead of horses, African elephants instead of the smaller and more docile kind found in Asia, and so on. I wonder how many Africans lost hands and arms before they finally concluded that the stripey little sods were never going to be manageable or useful.

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And the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas drew the short straw when it came to how much time they had to domesticate native animals before the Europeans came in and took over the continents. At the time of Spanish arrival they had turkeys down but that’s about it most indigenous civilizations had time to domesticate a handful of native species at most.

It would be interesting to see how societies might have developed differently if they’d had a few tens of thousands of years to domesticate animals like the bison or the coyote.

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As I watch two out of the three of our cats tear around our home like mad things, I once again find myself asking … are you sure they’re domesticated?

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Some guy on the inner tubes says:

“Llamas (Lama glama), —food, fiber, and pack animal
Alpacas (Vicugña pacos)-food and fiber
Guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus)-food
Muscovy ducks (Cairina moschata)- food and feathers
Domestic Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo)—food and feathers. They were domesticated twice, once in Central Mexico and once in the American SW.
Dogs (Canis familiaris) food, hunting, fiber, protection, pets
Stingless bees (Melipona beecheii) -food
and the Cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus)—dye
Macaws (Ara macao cyanoptera) were bred for hundreds of years and kept for feathers, trade, and ritual.
The Puna ibis (Plegadis ridgwayi)was domesticated for meat and eggs by the Uru people of the Uros islands in Lake Titicaca.”

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Sometimes you spend your initial turns concentrating on other things and the hex with the horses in it is way over there. You can get it right after you finish getting the Hanging Gardens.

image

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You’re right, I was misremembering something I read about the Maya specifically (though they too actually had dogs and ducks in addition to turkeys).

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Cats won’t start eating you until they are pretty sure you are dead; so I think that counts as domesticated. :smirk_cat:

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They do revert back pretty quickly, given the right circumstances! They can (but shouldn’t; I’m a proponent of strictly indoor cats) survive on their own without humans and the same can’t generally be said about dogs.

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Plenty of precedent for dogs too. Dingoes started out as domesticated dogs that humans brought over to Australia about 8000 years ago.

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Well horses horses were originally hunted for meat. If they tried farming horses for meat, it would have made things a bit easier to eventually figure out some of them would let you ride them if you raised them from when they were little. Some Neolithic 4-H kid gets too attached to their fair animal and ends up riding it.

Well there were native dog breeds, so not sure they needed coyotes. While not domesticated, per se, due to their herd sizes and migration patterns, there were areas on the Kansas plains that were more or less industrial meat processing plants. They would cull thousands of them at once and begin the process of harvesting pelts, meat, bones, and everything else useful. They then would tan the hides and process the meat into a preserved form, pemmican, both of which would be used for trade along with bone tools.

Where the history of the New World would have differed greatly if they had more domesticated species, would be the disease exchange between humans and livestock, creating New World plagues, resulting in the transmission of diseases from Europeans not being mostly one-way. Imagine boats continuing to arrive and everyone dying of New World Plague. Maybe a handful would have made it back and then spread it all over Europe. And the new world natives would have SOME immunity to the European diseases, fighting off similar ones already. At any rate, there whole “80-90% of the Indigenous population dying from disease” would have looked very different.

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:thinking: So they’ll wait until you’re at the top of the stairs before tripping you? Good to know. :smirk_cat: Also, they’ll make no attempt to call for help like a dog might do. Wow, that kid Timmy was really lucky! A cat would’ve just let him marinate in that well…

Angry Cat GIF

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:smile::smile::smile:

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… he may have seen a goat sitting on it first

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Yeah, I’m thinking of the dog in her bed gnawing on her bunny toy in front of me, rather than feral dogs. Coincidentally, she is likely a Kelpie/Cattle Dog cross, and they are rumoured to have dingo lineage. If I tossed her out and said “fend for yourself”, she wouldn’t be able to. The cat on my knee? He could probably feed himself.

And points to you; most people think that dingoes are native to Australia and they are not.

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