Word: vermaak
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Dates: during 1943-1943
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...mules were Freudians they would be kicking mad. They always have parents, rarely have offspring. Because they are the hybrid, infertile offspring of a mare and a jackass, race suicide is as involuntary among mules as old-fashioned families among rabbits. When Nickolaas Jecobus Vermaak, of Natal, South Africa, announced recently that his mare mule had thrown a "colt" sired by a stallion, neighboring farmers smiled incredulously. But he had rightly trusted his mule-sense. Mule-wise Dr. John Quinlan dashed over from the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute, confirmed his guess...
Mulish sterility is an old slander of this branch of the Equidae, based on a half-truth. The couplings of mule and mule are fruitless (the genetic grounds: incompatibility of chromosomes). But as in the case of Farmer Vermaak's sport, a mule mare now & then carries her own dam's chromosomes-and once in some 200,000 encounters meets the stallion that has her (germ-cell) number...
From such a biological blind date have come at least five recorded mule foals in recent years, one in Colombia (TIME, April 11, 1938), one in Farmer Vermaak's own Natal (TIME, April 13, 1932). Because, chromosomally speaking, the prodigy's mother is its own mother's mother also, the prodigy itself looks more like a horse than a mule. Recording cases of fertile mules, the U.S. Department of Agriculture brooks no superficiality, carries the question back to basic grounds. It cautions that mules themselves are a curiosity-"in the sense that the crossing of the horse...