Before I close this work, I desire to say something more about breeding mules.  It has long been a popular error that to get a good mule colt you must breed from large mares.  The average sized, compact mare, is by all odds the superior animal to breed mules from.  Experience has satisfied me that very large mules are about as useless for army service as very large men are for troopers.  You can get no great amount of service out of either.  One is good at destroying rations; the other at lowering haystacks and corn-bins.  Of all the number we had in the army, I never saw six of these large, overgrown mules that were of much service.  Indeed, I have yet to see the value in any animal that runs or rushes to an overgrowth.  The same is true with man, beast, or vegetable.  I will get the average size of either of them, and you will acknowledge the superiority.

The only advantage these large mares may give to the mule is in the size of the feet and bone that they may impart.  The heavier you can get the bone and feet, the better.  And yet you can rarely get even this, and for the reason that I have before given, that the mare, in nineteen cases out of twenty, breeds close after the jack, more especially in the feet and legs.  It makes little difference how you cross mares and jacks, the result is almost certain to be a horse’s body, a jack’s legs and feet, a jack’s ears, and, in most cases, a jack’s marks.

Nature has directed this crossing for the best, since the closer the mare breeds after the jack the better the mule.  The highest marked mules, and the deepest of the different colors, I have invariably found to be the best.  What is it, let us inquire, that makes the Mexican mule hardy, trim, robust, well-marked after the jack, and so serviceable?  It is nothing more nor less than breeding from sound, serviceable, compact, and spirited Mexican or mustang mares.  You must, in fact, use the same judgment in crossing these animals as you would if you wanted to produce a good race or trotting horse.

We are told, in Mason and Skinner’s Stud Book, that in breeding mules the mares should be large barrelled small limbed, with a moderate-sized head and a good forehead.  This, it seems to me, will strike our officers as a very novel recommendation.  The mule’s limbs and feet are the identical parts you want as large as possible, as everyone that has had much to do with the animal knows.  You rarely find a mule that has legs as large as a horse.  But the mule, from having a horse’s body, will fatten and fill up, and become just as heavy as the body of an average-sized horse.  Having, then, to carry this extra amount of fat and flesh on the slender legs and feet of a jackass, you can easily see what the result must be.  No; you will be perfectly safe in getting your mule as large-legged as you can.  And by all means let the mare you breed from have a good, sound, healthy block of a foot.  Then the colt will stand some chance of