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Frederic Remington's "THE PACKER"
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Bishop Mule Days Pack Team running down the track in front of the Grandstand. Photo by Charlie Palmer
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The Mule Flipside Complex
by Lisa Fergason
As it appeared in Western Mule Magazine March 1998 and on the Mulerider.com website
Why do you like mules? We prefer them to horses for reasons like "they're smarter...they have more personality...they're tougher and stronger...and mule won't hurt himself..." We love mules because they are special, different than a horse. But these traits or differences can have a flip side. They sometimes cause mulish actions that we find frustrating.
Mules can't help it--their donkey parent passes on characteristics to the mule that we love and hate about them! If you are accustomed to horses, you might have to widen your perception of what is natural behavior for this equine hybrid, taking a little bit bad with the good.
We brag about how smart the mule is. The intelligence of our equine friend is a wonderful combination of the horse and jackass parent. Yes, the mule is smart, that means you have to BE SMARTER, which is not always an easy task! The mule is smart because he's a self-preservationist and a self-thinker. These traits also contribute to the "stubborn mule" cliche when he thinks for himself and decides that a particular situation may hurt him. We admire the mule because he uses his own head...but can be frustrated when he doesn't want to go a million circles in the round pen, on the hotwalker or out in the arena...because he figures out that he's just not going anywhere, so what's the use?!
The mule is a quick learner. The downside/ He can also learn bad habits quickly! You have to be one steap ahead of them at all times, making the right things easy and the wrong things difficult. As quick learners, they get bored easily, finding things that get them into trouble. Like figuring out how to open the latch on the barn door and getting into the feed room.
Mules have a great memory. An advantage in training, they remember their lessons even if you don't work with them for a while. But they also don't forget the bad things. This makes it hard for us to work with mules to be them over bad experiences.
A big attraction of the mule to most of us is that they have more personality. But this sometimes translates into a more headstrong temperament. they don't yield as easily as horses do to some of our requests. To conteract this independence, you need to be very thorough in your training and communication with the mule to make sure that they rank you at the top of the pecking order of their herd.
Mules are tough, have a lot of endurance and are stronger than horses pound for pound. Great! But the old horse training techniques of working them into the ground to teach them something doesn't work very well on a mule. You can't train a mule by wearing them out, they'll wear you out first! You have to work smarter, not harder. The purposeof natural horsemanship and mulemanship is to help us to understand how these equines think so that we can work with them rather than against them. In "True Unity: Willing Communication between Horse and Human', Tom Dorrance points out that a horse or muleman "...needs to realize how the person's approach can assure the horse (and especially the mule) that he can have his self-preservation and still respond to what the person is asking him to do". You have to be aware that the strengths of mules can also be a challenge and accept these idiosyncracies.
The best advice I can give you on getting along with your mule is to enjoy his wonderful unique characteristics, accept the flipside of these traits, and HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR about all of it!
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