What animals lend themselves to being ridden by Quadrupeds?

Question

In my world, A hurricane has washed a group of 8,000 pachyderms off of Afro-Eurasia and onto a large island cluster. Due to the island rule, dwarfism ensues, and the population is made of of a group of tiny elephants that are 3 feet at the shoulder in adulthood. These elephant are, however, highly intelligent, with complex social behavior and use of basic tools.After a while , there society advances to a point where they have invented agriculture and domesticated plants such as potatoes and onions. However , they are in constant danger of predation from animals such as Terror birds , Gray wolves , and Big cats , do to their diminutive size and slow speeds. to combat this , they attempt to domesticate an animal to ride , enhancing the speed that they can fight or flee.

My question is: which animals could they domesticate that could be ridden by a quadrupedal animal such as themselves?

Answer 1

It's going to be difficult to find an animal capable of bearing their weight. Even a dwarf elephant is bulky.

I agree with AndreiROM that "a hurricane washed them ashore" is implausible. A more likely opening scenario is that initially the elephants lived on an archipelago until an undersea earthquake split the archipelago into several separate islands. For this purpose it would be best if the elephants' newly-created island were itself split by an almost impassible mountain range.

However it is achieved, you want the result that there was another population of elephants who were sufficiently isolated from yours that they didn't interbreed during the time in which your elephants were evolving intelligence. Assume the territory of the other population of elephants was much bigger, so they didn't evolve dwarfism. Nor did they evolve sentience.

Eventually your now sentient elephants learn how to cross the barrier between the two territories - or even how to return to the mainland - and bring back some of the animal elephants, who will be related to them in the same way as chimps are related to us. On thinking about it, for this scenario it is probably better if the barrier between the where the sentient and non-sentient elephants live is a mountain range rather than a strip of water, as the latter would require the sentient elephants to create barges good enough to transport animal elephants, no easy task.

So you could have small sentient elephants riding on normal non-sentient elephants. That would solve the problem of a steed strong enough, but the difficulty remains that body shape of a quadruped with stumpy legs is ill-suited for riding another animal. It would be easier to use chariots. In principle the chariots could be pulled by any beast strong enough, but normal-sized elephants would still be a good choice for that. They would also be useful to the sentient elephants for peaceful purposes such as pulling carts or ploughs.

Answer 2

First of all, the hurricane and the 8,000 elephants is implausible and unnecessary. You don’t need 8,000 of them to form a viable breeding population in any case.

Next, you need to factor in the fact that very few species of animal are domesticable at all or usable as riding beasts. As Jared Diamond points out in Guns Germs and Steel, so few animals can be domesticated that just a few dominate agriculture and have therefore been spread globally — the cow, goat, sheep, chicken, horse, pig, dog and cat. There are other domesticable species, including the elephant, but they prove to be less than optimal as domestic animals for a variety of reasons, explained below.

Diamond sets out six criteria that any species needs to meet to be readily domesticable:

1. They can’t be picky eaters as they must be fed using what’s available around settlements.
2. They must reach maturity quickly, relative to their owners’ lifespan, to make the investment in rearing them pay off. This is why Elephants, which take 15 years to reach maturity, are not more widely domesticated.
3. They must be willing to breed in captivity.
4. They must be docile by nature, or easily bred into docility.
5. They must not panic or flee when startled, or have a flocking behaviour which enables them to be herded when they do panic.
6. It’s better if they have a natural social hierarchy with strong pack leaders, so their owner can substitute for the pack leader.

Put this all together and you see why people everywhere eventually settled on the horse as the riding beast, rather than say the less-than-docile Zebra.

In your scenario, full-sized elephants might be interesting riding beasts, although the 15 years required to reach maturity would make them very expensive and long term investments. I’d love to see a dwarf pachyderm get into a Howdah or on to the back of any kind of riding beast with four tree-like legs and a trunk as a single arm/hand. Maybe carts and chariots are a better bet for your evolved pachyderms?

Answer 3

You must arrange for tortoises to mutate (domestication?) into draft animals. The idea of elephants riding tortoises is just too irresistable.

They have flat platforms that can be stood upon. This opens up the basic feature for selective breeding.

Note that, in general, you have one modified/changed species, so why not others? Besides the island effects, you have domestication which can change the animals even further and in extreme ways.