Zebra is a Jumping Horse

Sammi Jo Stohler had a problem: her zebra Zach kept jumping out of his field, so much that she had an eight-foot fence built. So she turned his habit into an asset by training Zach to show off his jumps! Stohler took Zach in after his former owner had trouble with him.

“As I was training horses, I kept hearing, ‘You can’t train zebras, they’re untrainable.’ I said, ‘Why?’ To say something is untrainable implies that it can’t learn, and we all know that if they couldn’t learn, they’d all be extinct. They have to be able to learn and adapt. Obviously, the burden lies on the trainer to be able to train them,” Stohler said.

She got her first zebra about 10 years ago. “He was a dream to work with, and I’ve been hooked ever since. They’re very intelligent. When you teach them something, you don’t have to do a lot of review,” she said. “You train them something, put them away for a few months, then bring them back out, and it’s exactly as if you didn’t stop. A lot of horses need review over and over again before they’re consistent.”

Stohler has two zebras, Zack and Charlie, on her farm in Willis, Texas, as well as a zorse (a zebra-horse cross) and a zonkey (a zebra-donkey cross). She rides Zack frequently, especially on trail rides, and drives Charlie. Her exotic animal rehabilitation skills have led her to work with birds of prey, antelope, deer, elk, camels and badgers.

Stohler intends for Zach to jump in demonstrations, but not in competition. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Kimberly Hahn-Orlaska)