How to judge a mule? For starters, look at the ears.
“Ears are important on a mule. An ear should be long and have a good cup to it,” Earl Sunderman says as he pauses at the edge of a dirt arena between the halter and jumping events on a fine and hot Sunday morning.
“The big, wide, long ones they call tobacco ears,” Sunderman explains, warming to the more esthetic aspects. “They don’t like them. They look like a tobacco leaf. They like ’em rolled, more like a corn shuck.”
In the background, a big bay mule brays. It is a sound that crosses honking into a handkerchief and priming a rusty water pump but with considerably more emotion. Around the grassy field where maybe 80 people have parked their cars and trailers, a chorus of mules answers the call.
Most of the families and mule owners attending this event in a one-stoplight town surrounded by the rolling hills and cornfields of south-central Iowa already know each other, and the only directional sign necessary, it appears, is the single piece of cardboard stuck on a pole with the words “mule show” and an arrow to point the way.
Expectations are never too high when it comes to mules. Indeed, the judge forgot about the event and at show time he still was a full two hours away cleaning his barn. “He’s never owned a mule in his life,” one participant says dismissively, “but he looks judicial.”
Throughout the summer there will be dozens of similar events across the Midwest. Once the tool of farmers, mules long since have retired from the hardscrabble life of the fields and furrows, but oddly enough, whether they are used for pleasure riding or mushroom hunting, mules are growing in popularity and price.
Events such as these are social occasions and the setting for much mule talk, for descriptions of mules bought and sold and for tales of prowess. Owners take pride in animals that are capable of rocking back from a complete standstill and clearing a 4 1/2-foot fence.
Despite such agility, mules and their owners are often the object of derision. “Horse people look down on mule people,” Mary Jo Crabtree notes with a certain reverse pride. Some might even see them as a subculture with attitude.
Mules are one-time animals-a cross-species bred out of a mare and a jackass-and therefore cannot breed themselves. And that may be what makes the difference between mule people and horse people.
A good mule may be worth from several hundred to several thousand dollars, but their uniqueness eliminates much of the money and anxiety over racing and showing more valuable horses.
Keeping a mule seems more like a relationship than a sport, and mules just won’t let people get away with many pretensions.
“You can’t have great pride when riding a mule. It is sure to embarrass you in some fashion,” declares Bill Paynter, president of the Iowa Donkey and Mule Society, which sponsored this show. “You’ve got to have a certain humility.”
The day before the show, Paynter and a half-dozen others went trail riding through rolling oak woods and across fields of alfalfa and timothy, a grass. While horses may outrun them, mules have a faster and steadier walk, and because the mules’ withers are smaller, riders sit higher toward the neck as the animals lunge through the woods.
But the real comparison, mule owners insist, comes after dark.
“When you go out raccoon hunting at night and come to a fence, you can’t always go around till you find a gate,” Sunderman patiently tells the uninitiated. “You need to cross it right away. So they trained mules to jump. You can train a horse to jump, but you can’t depend on it because they’re higher strung and more apt to get tangled in a wire.”
Put an old coat over the barbed wire or fence and “the mules’ll jump that slicker than a whistle,” Crabtree agrees. She sits in a lawn chair watching her son and grandchildren compete and recalls the first stirring of her own mule enthusiasm.
“They took me raccoon hunting a few years ago. My dad had raccoon-hunted, but I never knew the joy of raccoon hunting. I thought it was ridiculous. I thought it was a bunch of hicks and hounds.
“Well, my husband finally talked me into letting him get a hound, and so one night he took me. Our girls even used to go with him. And one night we were way out in the woods and you get three or four raccoons up the tree, and it is exciting . . . because the dogs are barking, and you’re trying to keep them up there on the attack and, if I was younger, I’d enjoy it.”
Back at the arena, Sunderman, who has agreed to fill in for the missing judge for the barrel and relay races, continues to talk about what constitutes a well-formed mule.
“He has to have a good slope to the shoulder, that makes for a longer reach when you’re riding them. One that’s too steep in the shoulder won’t take as long a stride so he’ll bounce you and shake you worse. Long pasterns (between the fetlock joint and the hoof), the longer the pastern you’ve got, the more cushioned the ride. A good round hip. A good big eye, a big kind eye.”
At this point Paynter, too, wants to emphasize the importance of eyes.
“The bigger the eye, that denotes intelligence generally, and the easier to get along with. A kind eye. Little eyes-they call ’em pig eyes-denote meanness. You want a big, soft, gentle eye.”
Paynter himself strikes a commanding figure. Astride his favorite half-appaloosa mule, Reggie, he heads straight from a competition in the fenced arena to visit friends who have retreated to the shade of the field’s only evergreen.
With considerable satisfaction he tells of how only the day before he tied Reggie to a pole in the tiny alley off the main street and stopped at the local six-stool tavern for a drink.
“You know, there’s just nothing like walking into a bar with your spurs on,” he says as his explosive and scratchy laugh punctuates the sentence.
“Bill’s quite a specialty, quite an experience all in himself,” remarks Crabtree. The other society members nod their heads rather affectionately, and Roger Bales takes a cigarette butt from his mouth and looks at Paynter galloping toward him.
“Bill Paynter reminds me of a kid who never had a pony, and now he’s an adult with a mule.”
Underneath his feathered cowboy hat, Paynter fancies a goatee and a mini-handlebar mustache waxed into two circles of stiff hair. Unlike most of the others who wear the utility khaki of farmers, Paynter wears a striped shirt and has his jeans tucked into tooled and worn cowboy boots. His spurs jingle.
A Greyhound station agent for 20 years and now a courier for Pony Express, Paynter relishes talk of history and legend, the stuff of mules. Leave romance to the next county over, the setting for the novel “The Bridges of Madison County.”
Psychology, however, is one of his favorite topics, and while he complains about dealing with the politics and personalities of a small club, he appreciates the independent streak in mules and masters. Like their animals, the owners can’t be browbeaten, they have to be convinced.
While it’s true that mules sometimes can get “snorty,” the handlers insist the stubborn-as-a-mule reputation is unfair; they just don’t get flustered.
“That’s the caution you have in a mule. He’s not going to go in anything he perceives as a danger, so he usually looks things over good before he will go into a situation,” Paynter says.
“They get that from donkeys. They’re very self-preserving. A horse will panic and run through the fence if he’s panicked enough. They just lose all sense of reason, a horse will. You can have a runaway with a mule, but he has some sense of where he’s going.”
There is much mule lore to share and the conversation drifts from the King of Spain sending the first in this country to George Washington to how the CIA flew 700 American pack mules to Pakistan so they could deliver Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry to the Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army got rid of its last mule pack, assigned to an artillery battery, in the 1950s, but riders such as Russell Dotts still use pack mules to go elk hunting in Wyoming. The majority of mules now, however, are for pleasure riding.
“I ride a mule for one reason: It’s easier on me,” Bales says with authority and unusual seriousness.
“And besides that, Roger,” his wife adds without missing a beat, “you can’t afford a horse.”
