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Animals are line bred to pass on their characteristics because they have been crossed for certain reasons. i.e. big hips, color, head shape, gait, height, demeanor. You name it. All depends on the breed. That’s a common thing to have been done with horse flesh. So it’s easy to find them. Phenotypical traits are commonly things that you can see. In cattle, for example, you may want to breed for something like heat endurance, mothering ability or disease resistance. Things you can’t see just by looking at the animal. Those are genotypic characteristics.
Open breeding is just the opposite of line breeding. Very few copied animals, if any, in several pedigree generations.
Jackstock in the United States started out as composite of 5 different donkey breeds. In the recent past, people like George Hineman, Frank Mills, and L.W. Knight bred jacks for show and to produce consistant jack stock, so they line bred. The animals that didn’t make the grade were used to breed for mules. And they were bred to whatever mare that came down the road. It was more of a crap shoot. For examples read a book by Harvey Riley called “The Mule”. Their market was primarily the government. They had need for all kinds of mules, by the carload. So as long as they were structurally sound they would sell.
Today we are breeding to make designer mules except that way keep dead ending with the sterile offspring we call the mule.
We know what our mare stock is bred for, but if we breed to a line bred jack we loose consistency because the two animals are fighting genetically. Each time you breed those same 2 animals to get a mule, it’s likely you’ll end up with something different because of the law of percentages.
To better your chances, when breeding for mules, breed to what you know.
A quality mule jack is harder to come across than a quality donkey jack. Just because of population numbers. So why not go with something that someone has already proven (line bred mares).The jack carries Seiman’s Glen, Jen Jack, Starlight Paragon, and Kansas Chief breeding. (Open bred)
The mare is almost exclusively Skipper W breeding through his son Spanish Array. (Line bred)
We get the same kind of mule every time we cross them.
That mare had 7 mules crossed to that jack that look and act very similar.
I hope this helps clear up what you were wondering about.
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