HELL YEAH MULES

I have been, for a long time, fascinated by the mule. I don’t mean in some larger, philosophical sense. This isn’t going to be some brandy-swirling reflection on the humility of the mule, written by someone with precisely zero blisters on any hand. Do I consider it a criminally overlooked animal? Yes. My reasoning, however, is the opposite of high-minded. I just think that their existence is insanely fucking weird.

I remember assuming, for at least a decade if not two, that mules were very much their own animal, and that, like other animals, they were begat by long lines of mules before them. If you’re not brushed up on barnyard science, mules are unique in that they are a one-off, single-use combination made by a horse and a donkey engaging in what feels like a forbidden farmyard tryst. As a detail of their particular origin, already one that feels a bit like God forgot to dot an i somewhere, they are completely sterile. Every mule is the end of a bloodline.

This is what inspired my fascination into the mule, and should inspire yours, if you have a shred of wonder left in you. The existence of animal hybrids was something I felt had been definitively and directly dispelled for me as a child. No, my parents explained to me with gingerness like they were about to write “From Mom & Dad” on Christmas presents for the first time. A lion-shark combination was not the killing machine I’d expertly portrayed in crayon, but a biological impossibility. It was simply not possible, because if it was, the CIA probably would have already made one in an attempt to kill Fidel Castro.

Years later, I was filled in on the existence of a footnote to that lesson. The means did exist, but only in certain specific cases. Ones that I might understand better had AP Biology not been my first class of the day and therefore experienced exclusively through the 2-hour haze the adolescent brain needs to activate after waking up. Trying to teach a teenager Punnett Squares at 8:30 AM is like expecting a diesel engine to take you to the store ten minutes after digging it out of a snowbank.

At first I was disappointed, mostly due to the mules’ lack of fangs, a central feature of the many chimeras I’d cooked up in my head. Lack of kill potential aside, I did still grow a deep respect for this biologically criminal half-creature. An infertile creature of surprising power, called upon at moments when humans needed an incredible amount of shit hauled. An infertile bastard summoned through braying coitus to build the Great Pyramids. Every empire, it seems, was built on the back of a battery of mules. Maybe due to poor livestock partitioning, a happy accident, and a farmhand unwilling to immediately put down what must have seemed at the time like an omen of great misfortune, they’ve been side by side with humans for an unbelievably long period of our history.

Is the explanation for why, exactly, mules work simpler than I would think? Probably, but quite honestly, I don’t have much interest in tamping down my fascination with that knowledge. I’m generally a man of science, but I also deeply treasure keeping a few things unexplained for the sake of joy. Sure, it’s helpful to know what albinism exists, but it’s absolutely more fun to think that what you are looking at is the King of Pigeons. Not to mention the mule somehow being stronger than either a horse or a donkey alone. To me, that means we’ve been lucky enough to unlock a secret beast, an easter egg left behind by our divine developers. Lastly, however much knowledge you force-feed me, I think the fact that mules are sterile is still the natural world declaring this wasn’t really supposed to work. 

I’d much rather see them as the magnum opus of a less-maniacal and much more practical Dr. Moreau, occupying a fairly pleasant island where the only cause for alarm is the efficiency with which construction materials are transported. They may not have the natural glow to find themselves on binder covers and quiet kids’ t-shirts like the unicorn, but they’re a magical hooved creature in their own right. Besides, I’d like to see a unicorn try to haul thirty percent of its body weight more than a hundred yards. You’d end up picking horn shards out of a pile of blood-soaked cargo.

They’re an incredible creature, and I am, at this moment, heartbroken that I have never fed one a carrot. Writing this has only hardened my love of the mule. I will be adding them to my list, alongside the helicopter and the jetski, of things I’d really like to ride before I die. If you’re a farm that can make this happen, keeping in mind I have no money for airfare, please contact me.

P.S. For the sake of completeness, I’ll add the clarification (god, is there anything less fun than a clarification) that a mule is specifically the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Breeding a male horse and a female donkey gives you, instead, something called a “hinny”, which nobody seems to give a fuck about. Except for the female donkeys, who probably consider the hinny’s comparative unpopularity a blessing.

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