If you put a bunch of horses, zebras and donkeys in a large field together, with enough grass, vegetation, water, etc. to consume but without any human intervention - would there be interbreeding going on? If not, what do you think this scenario would look like more generally? Thanks in advance :)
Generally, when there is no human intervention, hybridization is very rare.
Horses are present in Africa, where there are populations of both wild ass and zebra, and yet wild zorse or even wild mules are basically unheard of. See also, the American southwest, where horses and burros are both invasive and yet you don't see feral mules among them.
This is because animals that have speciated, or become different species, have different estrus cycles, different courtship rituals and different behavior patterns that tend to make matings of this type very rare. Especially with horses, where mares tend to live in a herd that is protected by a stallion that will fight to the death over breeding rights to said mares.
A feral burro would not likely fare well against a feral horse stallion, if it attempted a mating with a feral mare at all.
You also see this even with animals that are much closer related to one another such as dogs, wolves and coyotes. All three of these animals have considerable overlap and can even produce viable offspring unlike a horse and a donkey. However it's still exceedingly rare for it to happen in the wild.
Wolves and coyotes are seasonal breeders that go into estrus at different times, and the strong territorial nature of these animals means they seldom mix. A wild wolf and a wild dog, or a wild dog and a wild coyote, or a wild wolf and wild coyote, are more than likely going to see each other as either a threat or a prey item and attack it accordingly.
Being raised by humans and made to tolerate one another with behavioral modification and artificial introductions to create cross species relationships, often by introducing the animals when they're still babies, gets them over the differences that usually prevent their union.
While sometimes wild hybrids do happen naturally, even then many times it's considered a survival response to pressures exerted on them by humans. See the eastern coyote, which is said to have considerable wolf ancestry, which may have happened because wolves were so strongly persecuted as to be almost entirely wiped out while the coyote was able to adapt. The more adaptable or desperate wolves threw their lot in with the survivors. (Though there is also some conjecture that even the eastern coyote is much less of a hybrid and more of just a large coyote without as much wolf or dog influence as previous believed)
Nature doesn't tend to encourage hybridization, and while you may get one or two fluke mules from such a group, if they had enough space to escape one another and access to their own kind to mate with, you wouldn't see it very much.
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