Mules and hinnies can be male or female, but are almost always infertile.
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Mules are bred far more often than hinnies because male donkey/female horse pairings are about as successful as horses breeding with horses, a rate of about 65 percent.
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A study of mules, which have horse mothers and donkey fathers, and hinnies, with horse fathers and donkey mothers, found that genes from the animals' fathers were predominant in the placenta, the temporary organ that joins the mother and fetus during pregnancy.
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Hinnies are difficult to obtain because of the differences in the number of chromosomes of the horse and the donkey. A donkey has 62 chromosomes, whereas a horse has 64. Hinnies, being hybrids of those two species, have 63 chromosomes and are in the majority of cases sterile. The uneven number of chromosomes results in an incomplete reproductive system.
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According to the ADMS: "The equine hybrid is easier to obtain when the lower chromosome count, the donkey, is in the male. Therefore breeding for hinnies is more hit-and-miss than breeding for mules." The male hinny or mule can and will mate, but the emission is not fertile. Male hinnies and mules are usually castrated to help control their behavior by eliminating their interest in females.
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Messara horses are used for light farm work and for transportation, but more often are also being used for riding and racing. The stallions are often crossed with female donkeys (Jennies) to produce hinnies.
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It is harder to cross species if the female has less chromosomes than the males, as in the crossing of a stallion and a jenny (female donkey); this results in minimal breeding of hinnies.
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New York: Norton. , p. 800 Sterility is often attributed to the different number of chromosomes between the two species. For example, donkeys have 62 chromosomes, horses have 64 chromosomes, and mules or hinnies have 63 chromosomes.
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The term mulard or moulard is generally reserved for offspring where the parental drake is a muscovy and the duck is a pekin. When the drake is a pekin, the offspring tend to be smaller and are called hinnies.
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The head of a hinny is said to resemble that of a horse more than it does a mule's, with shorter ears (although these are still longer than those of horses), and more horse-like manes and tails than mules. Beyond the physiological, hinnies and mules differ in temperament despite sharing nuclear genomes. This, too, is believed to be attributable to the action of imprinted genes. A male hinny is properly called a horse hinny, and a female hinny is properly called a mare hinny, though in British English both female hinnies and female donkeys are sometimes called jennets.
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Peneias are used as draft animals, pack animals, and mounts for riding and jumping. The stallions are often used for breeding hinnies. Crosses with the Thoroughbred have produced faster horses, while the Hellenic National Stud Book Society is promoting a new breeding program crossing Peneia stallions with light draft mares.
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24; Ratcliffe, Michael, "Sweat and sadism", The Observer, 13 August 1989, p. 38; Hepple, Peter. "Farce impressions last", The Stage, 17 August 1989, p. 40; Sherrin, Ned. "Alas, no singing hinnies", The Times, 19 August 1989, p. 26 and in 2010–11 in a successful one by Richard Eyre, starring Tom Hollander.
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The Donkey Sanctuary of Canada is a Canadian charity devoted to the welfare of donkeys, mules and hinnies. It was founded by Sandra Pady with her husband David in Guelph, Ontario. It is similar to The Donkey Sanctuary founded by Elizabeth Svendsen in England and Dr Svendsen provided advice to Sandra Pady when she started.
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Newcastle Roller Girls was established in 2009 by Claire Byrne (Brie Larceny). The league has three teams, the Canny Belters (A team), the Whippin' Hinnies (B team) and the North Cs (C team). The club follows the WFTDA gender statement. Home bouts are played at the Walker Dome and Benfield Sports Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne.
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A male donkey (jack) can be crossed with a female horse to produce a mule. A male horse can be crossed with a female donkey (jenny) to produce a hinny. Horse-donkey hybrids are almost always sterile because horses have 64 chromosomes whereas donkeys have 62, producing offspring with 63 chromosomes. Mules are much more common than hinnies.
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Hinnies are rare for many other reasons. Donkey jennies and horse stallions can be choosier about their mates than horse mares and donkey jacks. Thus, the two parties involved may not even care to mate. Even if they do cooperate, donkey jennies are less likely to conceive when bred to a horse stallion than horse mares are when bred to a donkey jack.
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Male mules (johns) are sterile, but fertile female mules (mollies) sometimes occur. The different number and different structure in chromosomes makes it difficult for them to pair up. Donkeys have 62 chromosomes and horses have 64, so their hybrids (mules and hinnies) have 63. Zebras have between 32 and 46 (depending on the species) and their hybrids are sterile and infertile.
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In the wild, the horses and donkeys ignore each other and do not cross. In order to obtain mules or hinnies it is necessary to train the progenitors to accept copulation between the species or create them through artificial insemination. The sterility of many interspecific hybrids in angiosperms has been widely recognised and studied. Interspecific sterility of hybrids in plants has multiple possible causes.
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The sketch was as follows :- Programme announcer – This is This is the Northern Programme. Here’s a tale about the day the Marley’s spent going to the place where the Blaydon Races were run. The famous races that the song was written about were held seventy-five years ago today….... Marley – (after humming the concluding bars) Hillo!, ah’ll back ye knaa wat the tune is? Ay hinnies, "Blaydon Races", Tyneside’s National Anthem.
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Some large donkey breeds such as the Asino di Martina Franca, the Baudet de Poitou and the Mammoth Jack are raised only for mule production. The hybrid between a stallion and a jenny is a hinny, and is less common. Like other inter-species hybrids, mules and hinnies are usually sterile. Donkeys can also breed with zebras in which the offspring is called a zonkey (among other names).
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Its location, deep in a dense forest, was chosen by God, and an eagle with a shining cross on its head showed it to Vladimir. After the saint was decapitated, he brought his head to the church, and was buried inside. A group of Franks once stole the casket with his miraculous relics. The casket turned out to be extremely heavy, breaking the backs of the hinnies on which the Franks carried it.
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Female hinnies and mules are not customarily spayed, and may or may not go through estrus. Female mules have been known, on rare occasions, to produce offspring when mated to a horse or donkey, although this is extremely uncommon. Since 1527, sixty cases of foals born to female mules around the world have been documented. In contrast, according to the ADMS, there is only one known case of a female hinny doing so.
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Breeding large hinnies is an even bigger challenge, as it requires stock from a jenny of large size, such as the Baudet de Poitou or American Mammoth Donkey. Mammoth donkey stock is becoming increasingly rare and has been declared an endangered domestic breed. Fanciers are unlikely to devote a Mammoth jenny's valuable breeding time to producing sterile hinny hybrids, when Mammoth jennies are in high demand to produce fertile purebred Mammoth foals.
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Hinnies are the reciprocal cross to the more common mule. Comparatively, the average hinny has a smaller stature, shorter ears, stronger legs, and a thicker mane than the average mule. The distinct phenotypes of the hinny and the mule are partly attributable to genomic imprinting—an element of epigenetic inheritance. Physiological arguments for the differing stature of the hinny and the mule cite the smaller womb of the female donkey (dam) versus the larger womb of the female horse (mare).
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And just as female mules and hinnies only very rarely produce offspring the same appears to be true of zebroids. Considering zebroids are much less common as mules the chances of a fertile zebroid mare are very slim. Only ONE case of such a mare was reported : The zebroid mare of a zebra mare x draft horse stallion produced a foal when she was bred back to her sire but the foal died of lightning and she did not survive it much longer.
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Hinnies and mules are hybrids resulting from a cross between a horse and a donkey or between a mare and a donkey, respectively. These animals are nearly always sterile due to the difference in the number of chromosomes between the two parent species. Both horses and donkeys belong to the genus Equus, but Equus caballus has 64 chromosomes, while Equus asinus only has 62. A cross will produce offspring (mule or hinny) with 63 chromosomes, that will not form pairs, which means that they do not divide in a balanced manner during meiosis.
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The Milk Rollers took first place in the Great Yorkshire Showdown tournament in July, 2012. On 22 September 2012, the league launched their B Team in a closed bout against the Norfolk Brawds, their first open bout being against the Newcastle Roller Girls Whippin Hinnies. Middlesbrough Roller Derby plays by the rules of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) and is a member of the UK Roller Derby Association (UKRDA). In April 2013, Middlesbrough was accepted as a member of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association Apprentice Program.
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This is because donkeys come in many sizes, from miniatures, as small as at the withers, to American mammoth donkeys that may be over at the withers. Thus, a hinny is restricted to being about the size of the largest breed of donkey. Mules, however, have a female horse as a parent, so they can be as large as the size of the largest breed of horse, such as those foaled from work horse mares such as the Belgian. Physical differences between hinnies and mules are not restricted to stature.
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A hybrid will have a number of chromosomes exactly halfway between that of its parents; for example, a cross between a horse (64 chromosomes), and a plains zebra (44 chromosomes), will produce a zebroid offspring with 54 chromosomes. The chromosome difference makes female hybrids poorly fertile and male hybrids generally sterile, due to a phenomenon called Haldane's rule. The difference in chromosome number is most likely due to horses having two longer chromosomes that contain similar gene content to four zebra chromosomes. Just as male mules and hinnies are infertile so are male zebroids.
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Mules, hinnies, and other normally sterile interspecific hybrids cannot produce viable gametes, because differences in chromosome structure prevent appropriate pairing and segregation during meiosis, meiosis is disrupted, and viable sperm and eggs are not formed. However, fertility in female mules has been reported with a donkey as the father. A variety of mechanisms limit the success of hybridisation, including the large genetic difference between most species. Barriers include morphological differences, differing times of fertility, mating behaviors and cues, and physiological rejection of sperm cells or the developing embryo.
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Further, mares are usually larger than jennies and thus have more room for the ensuing foal to grow in the womb, resulting in a larger animal at birth. It is commonly believed that mules are more easily handled and also physically stronger than hinnies, making them more desirable for breeders to produce. The offspring of a zebra-donkey cross is called a zonkey, zebroid, zebrass, or zedonk; zebra mule is an older term, but still used in some regions today. The foregoing terms generally refer to hybrids produced by breeding a male zebra to a female donkey.
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Growth potential of equine offspring may be influenced by the size of the dam's womb. The American Donkey and Mule Society (ADMS) appears to interpret these differences as wholly physiological, stating: "The genetic inheritance of the hinny is exactly the same as the mule." Be that as it may, the epigenetic inheritance of the hinny is not the same as the mule, as "the differences between the mule and the hinny are now known to be caused by genomic imprinting, whereby the expression of a gene is determined by its origin rather than its DNA sequence". Like mules, hinnies express broad variation in stature.
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Mules and hinnies have 63 chromosomes, a mixture of the horse's 64 and the donkey's 62. The different structure and number usually prevents the chromosomes from pairing up properly and creating successful embryos, rendering most mules infertile. A few mare mules have produced offspring when mated with a purebred horse or donkey. Herodotus gives an account of such an event as an ill omen of Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC: "There happened also a portent of another kind while he was still at Sardis—a mule brought forth young and gave birth to a mule" (Herodotus The Histories 7:57), and a mule's giving birth was a frequently recorded portent in antiquity, although scientific writers also doubted whether the thing was really possible (see e.g.
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This allowed the league to organise their first home bout at Ponds Forge International Sports Centre in July 2010. On September 3, 2011 the league B team, the Crucibelles, debuted against the Whippin' Hinnies, the Newcastle Roller Girls B team, in a double header that also saw the All Stars play Newcastle's A Team, the Canny Belters. Sheffield Steel Rollergirls entered the Women's Flat Track Derby Association Apprentice Programme in July 2012,"WFTDA Accepts 35 Apprentice Leagues", WFTDA, 16 July 2012 and became full members of the WFTDA in June 2013."WFTDA Welcomes First Full Member Leagues in Asia and South America", 6 June 2013 In January 2019, the league changed its name to Sheffield Steel Roller Derby as a move to reflect the inclusive nature of the league and the sport as a whole.
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