MULE BREEDING.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 526, 24 February 1876, Page 3

MULE BREEDING.

(From the Field.') Everyone who has hunted with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds, cannot fail to have been struck with the splendid team of four mules, standing sixteen to seventeen hands high, which, ridden by two postilions, draw the hound van to distant meets. In fact, in Gloucestershire, the Badminton mules have for many years been renowned for their size, strength, and capacity for work. In addition to being used in the hound van, they have been found very efficient for farming and road purposes, as well as for all kinds of heavy draught work on the estate ; and their extraordinary capacity for hauling timber among stubs and ruts has often excited the astonishment of spectators. The majority of Badminton mules are, we believe, home-bred, their dams being Clydesdale or other cart mares, and their sires imported Spanish or Maltese asses. During the last summer, however, the Spanish ass, which has for some years been used as a stud animal, performed the unusual feat—in a donkey sense—of actually dying ; and in order to replace him, we learn that his grace has lately imported from Poitou two splendid male specimens of the famous Poitevin race of donkeys, for breeding mules. These asses stand about fourteen hands and a-half, and are splendid specimens, having the characteristically enormous limbs and substance of the race. It is proposed to mate them with English or Clydesdale cart mares, and there is every reason to believe that the result will give animals of a kind superior to anything that has ever been bred in the way of mules. The recent introduction of classes of mules, as well as for asses for breeding mules, into the schedules of some ot our leading agricultural societies, has brought the subject to the notice of the public ; and looking at the scarcity of horses, it is worthy the consideration of persons who require for heavy draught purposes animals at once efficient, economical, enduring, wonderfully free from disease and accident, as well as very tractable when properly broken.