kalessinsdaughter:

The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of “cute donkeys” and came up with my head full of things I didn’t know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.

Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.

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The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:

Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that’s about the single thing they’re better at than a mule of the same size.

So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.

Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule

A bay roan mare with a young buckskin mule coltALT

But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That’s because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it’s easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.

Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it’s arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it’s shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.

The Poitevin mule

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This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.

With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they’re very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.

The Poitevin Mulassier

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Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.

The Baudet du Pitou

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(via silvain-shadows)

very cool cool critters

kckenobi:

oh. my god I was just writing a fic and I was about to say “he grimaced as if he’d bitten into a lemon” when it occurred to me, hang on, are there lemons in Star Wars? Or are they called something else? Despite the fact that it literally does not matter sksjs I went to google it and I typed in “Star Wars lemons” FORGETTING, in my brief naivety WHAT LEMONS USED TO MEAN

so you can imagine what came up

(via miscklaire)

laugh rule yeah mood I’ve also done this but not with Star Wars

zevsurana:

zevsurana:

zevsurana:

more poly da2 ships should take advantage of the fact that isabela, canonically when she finds out someone has a crush, announces herself as a great matchmaker who always wins. and by this i mean a stupid sitcom plot where shes trying to set up hawke with a different li while clearly being in love with everyone involved and vice versa

she keeps trying to set them up on dates but they always also want her to come bc they love her so she’s like damn guess i’ll third wheel haha… Foiled Again… (has a really good time they are absolutely all on this date)

varric: so let me get this straight. for the book. you had a threesome with hawke… altruistically?

isabela: you think those two were going to get it together on their own?

varric: but you’re still sleeping with them

isabela: they might still need a helping hand

varric: uh-huh

isabela: what can i say, i’m a giver

(via assigned-knives-at-birth)

laugh rule Yeah that tracks da2 dragon age

nomadiclegends:

pokefuseme:

sudorm-rfslash:

bedrock-to-buildheight:

astraldemise:

astraldemise:

astraldemise:

astraldemise:

theres too many pokemon games where you play as a kid whos full of life and full of potential. there needs to be a pokemon game where you play as a college dropout who lives in a shitty apartment

your starter pokemon are trubbish, rattata and glameow. which symbolise the trash you keep forgetting to take out, the rats living in your walls and the stray cat you keep trying to befriend but it keeps hissing at you.

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you guys dont get it its not supposed to be dark and edgy its supposed to be living in a mundane setting and slowly rediscovering the wonder in the world by going on a journey with a magical trash bag that is your friend, its about love and recovery and coping with the stress of your adult life with your friend who is made of sentient garbage

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I’ve never been so attached to literal trash before

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I am similarly attached to the sentient trash. Can’t wait to take him on little adventures

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(via mistyheartrbs)

I want to play this game pokemon

talesfromthecrypts:

Its crazy how many people think everyone who works in tv and film is rich. The only rich people are the execs and the tippy top percentile of directors and actors. Listen to any actor who is well known for a tv show and they’ll tell you they make more money from cons than what they made on their show.

Support the writer’s strike and when the director’s guild and SAG go on strike support them too.

(via absentlyabbie)

yeah people think that because they’re all thinking of like the big name marvel actors but that’s like the one percent of the one percent

bogleech:

I think I’ve said this exact thing before but it’s so freaking weird that we put breasts on so many alien creatures and anthropomorphic animals because the two prominent boobs are something totally unique to humans.

That’s like if we were chicken people and gave all our fictional beings cock’s combs. Even robots and cartoon bugs and shit.

Or maybe if we were turtle people and our version of Star Trek assumed a vast majority of alien races would have turtle shells cause that’s just so normal to us and marketing executives assume nobody will buy a game or watch a movie where the characters don’t have turtle shells.

Walrus pop culture where everything has tusks.

Termite people giving all their female characters huge colossal pulsating abdomens even if they’re cats or fish or humans.

Proboscis monkey pop culture where anything designated “male” has a big dangly fat nose to make it sexier.

(via janicevaranus)

yeah it is wild because it’s not like it’s even an ape thing it’s really strictly a humans thing humans are improbable


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