What is a Mule?

A horse which has long ears?
A donkey which is similar to a horse?

The voice, so incredible, that it cannot be described.

What makes this animal so special?

When a male donkey and a female horse get an offspring, then this offspring is a hybrid of both races and is called “mule”. When a male horse and a female donkey get an offspring, then the hybrid is called a hinny.

From the zoological point of view, the differences between mule and hinny are still not researched enough, so we still cannot say clearly that a hinny has these and a mule has those properties. That’s why people still call hinnys mules, or just donkeys.

The mule is basically an invention of the human and was done by an accident. In different books just like in Lorrain Travis’s book “The Mule”, you can read, that 3000 years before Christ in Nubia, people first tried to create a hybrid between horse and donkey. The breed foals had better properties than the steed less horses of that time age. That was the beginning of the mule husbandry.

Mules have thick and short head and long ears, a short mane, narrow hooves and it tail is hairless.

The mule belongs, just like its parents to the family of “Equides”, so it has the behaviour of both animals. It is an herbivore animal, and in the wild, both horse and donkey are preys, and are hunted by predators. Horses live in wide open areas and donkeys in rocky mountain shaped areas. In this case horses have to flee with their herd. Donkeys have more possibilities it is not always recommended to flee, when living on a mountain (cliffy paths, danger of plunge) they can flee downhill or stay in place if they can’t be reached by the predator. Also in this case a mule has a mixed behaviour, when it is in danger in wide areas it sometimes decides to run away or it just stands still. Sometimes when a mule feels danger it tries to defend itself very aggressive, but that doesn’t mean that it has a mad personality, it is the mule’s mixed behaviour.

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