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The Jack - the sire of a mule.
The parents of a mule are a donkey father and a horse mother. (The opposite cross, a stallion and female donkey or jenny, is known as a hinny, not nearly as common as a mule.)
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Here's an article I wrote for the January 03 Special Breeding Issue of Mules & More Magazine.
So you want to raise a Saddle Mule...Selecting the Jack
By Lisa Fergason, Equines by Design, Sanger, Texas
If you want to raise a good mule, the selection of the parents is most important. Generally, people have seen quite a few horses and are able to judge the quality, conformation and way of going of horses reasonably well. On the other hand, the average person who wants to raise a mule may not have been exposed to a great number of donkeys, especially jacks. So this article is written for those who feel they need a little help in selecting the jack.
Temperment is #1 on the list for me, if the jack has a bad attitude or is untrainable, I most certainly do not want
that passed on to my saddle mules. There’s too many good jacks out there to settle for one with less than a nice
temperament.
Good conformation for a jacksire can be compared to good conformation of a horse. You’re looking for the same
basic qualities:
--straight legs (forelegs when viewed from the front and hocks from the rear)
--a long sloping (not a short straight) shoulder and hip
--the hind legs should stand up fairly straight, not a lot of angle or “crook” to his hock and he stands and moves
with his hocks up underneath himself pretty well
--long neck with a clean throatlatch (stay away from the short-necked jack, he will sire mules that are not very
flexible and don’t give to the bit very well. Take into consideration that if the jack is overweight, his throatlatch
may be thick due to fat and not necessarily a conformational fault)
--an attractive head--short from nose to poll, with a nice wideset eyes (stay away from “pig eyes”), smooth over the
forehead, without the bony protrusions over the eyes (called hooded eyes). I know that a lot of the old-time jack and mule breeders put a lot of emphasis on a “good” ear, one whose tip curves to the inside, so that might be
something to look for.
After I looked at each particular area of conformation, I would step back and look to see if the jack as “balanced”.
By balanced, I mean that everything ties in well, an unbalanced animal would noticeably have one area of his
conformation that does not match up with the rest of his body. For example, he looks good everywhere except that
his hip/butt drops off really short and step, he looks lacking in that area.
I really want to watch a jack travel. His legs should push straight forward and back, without “swinging” to the
inside or outside. I like to see the jack keep his hind legs up underneath himself, the point of the hocks don’t pass much farther back than the point of his hip. And I don’t want to see any looseness to his gait, I don’t want the hocks to “wobble”. Now I have heard some of the gaited mule breeders say that they want a “loose-gaited” jack, so if that’s the type of mule you are breeding for, then you might talk to a gaited person about that.
In general, I want the jack to look “smooth”, not all bony and coarse. Smooth more like a horse. Smooth through
the head and body, without hipbones, eye hoods, pointed shoulders, etc. sticking up through the body of the animal.
I would like to be able to observe the “activity” of the jack. For a saddle mule, you would choose a jack that is
more active, one that moves around in his pen or pasture, especially desirable if he likes to trot and lope a lot in the pasture. This kind of jack will sire you a good saddle mule that is easy to train to move out, whether it be for the showring or as a good trail animal.
These are just the basics of what makes a jack a good saddle mule sire. The more donkeys you can look at, the
better. And of course, the horse half of the parentage is equally important. Good luck on your goal of raising a
nice saddle mule!
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