Zebra black and white at birth. Plains and mountain zebra foals are protected by their mothers, as well as the head stallion and the other mares in their group. Grévy's zebra foals have only their mother as a regular protector, since, as noted above, Grévy's zebra groups often disband after a few months. Attempts have been made to train zebras for riding, since they have better resistance than horses to African diseases. While occasionally successful, most of these attempts failed due to the zebra's more unpredictable nature and tendency to panic under stress. For this reason, zebra-mules or zebroids (crosses between
Mountain zebra found nothing to support the separation of the two mountain zebra populations into separate species. They concluded that the Cape mountain zebra and Hartmann's mountain zebra should remain as subspecies. This is consistent with the third edition of "Mammal Species of the World" (2005), which lists the mountain zebra as a single species ("Equus zebra") with two subspecies. The mountain zebra has a dewlap, which is more conspicuous in "E. z. zebra" than in "E. z. hartmannae". Like all extant zebras, mountain zebras are boldly striped in black or dark brown, and no two individuals look exactly alike. The whole