As a small kid for sure. Our pet rabbit used to hump the cat - both males - and the cat used to let him! This fueled many a discussion on sexuality and reproduction in the animal world.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mule though, would I be familiar with them through cowboy films maybe?
This.
I learned about jennys sometime in elementary school. But I’ve always known about mules.
I didn’t see a mule in the flesh until I was 12, though.
12 or 13. I remember learning about sterile hybrids in 7th grade Life Science. I was blown away, and couldn’t understand at first how mules repopulate if they can’t breed.
A cross between a wolf and a dolphin? Cool.
Another person who remembers reading it in an Encyclopedia Brown story. And I knew it already when I read the story so I must have learned it before that.
There was also a character named the Mule in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and he revealed he had adopted that name because he was sterile. But I read that later than the above.
Here’s an additional factoid. Hinnies are rarer than mules. It’s due to chromosomes. Horses have 64 chromosomes, donkeys have 62 chromosomes, and mules and hinnies have 63 chromosomes. Hybrids are much more difficult to breed when the male has more chromosomes than the female.
I forget exactly but around 6-8 or so. Some of the Amish kids I grew up with were a wealth of knowledge like that.
Ditto all of this (except I’m older and very much *not *wiser than WhyNot)
When I was a kid. I was really into George Washington and he had done a lot breeding of mules, I came across the fact in one of the books about him.
I don’t get it. How does it tell you he’s a liar, aside from the fact that making a living in the equine world is often difficult? Mules don’t happen by accident… someone has to bring the donkey jack and the horse mare together deliberately. People do breed them on purpose, though I suppose it’s meant to imply that you can’t take two mules and breed more.
On the other hand, I did just learn that you can use molly mules as surrogate mothers for horse foals. They may not be able to produce viable offspring, but they still have the parts. It’s being done around here to breed very expensive Gypsy Vanner horses.
This was the type of stuff which my parents liked to pass along. I remember my mother talking about it and I was probably less than 10. Let’s see, more like six or seven.
No idea…heck, I’m 62 years old and I’ve got lots of important sh…stuff to remember; memory banks do not store such things like this for all that long.
I remember my dad talking about it, and that I was a kid at the time. But I have no clue what age it was.
Sangahyando, your teacher was being pedantic, and would therefor fit in fine around here. I have a second cousin who breeds mules and has apparently bred a few champions. It’s just not mules that you breed to breed mules. There are specific varieties of donkeys and horses that are specifically bred in order to produce specific types of mules.
While looking for my cousin’s champion mules online, I ran across a story of a mule that had given birth. For centuries there were stories of occasional mules who did this and arguments on whether it was true and how it could happen.
Turns out that for the recent such birth, they could do tests to prove that the colt was genetically related to the mother. The colt was found to have some cells with 64 chromosomes, like a horse, and some with 63, like a mule. Apparently some female mules produce “mosaic eggs”. The article commented that the practice of keeping mules, horses, and donkeys penned separately may be making mule births look more unlikely than they are. Not that they’re saying they could be common.
Probably about seven. I learned it either from Encyclopedia Brown, just like everybody else in this thread, or from reading a magazine article about one of those fluke cases where a mule did give birth; I definitely remember reading both of those things, but I have no idea which came first.
I was probably 8 or 9 years old, and listening to this album that my parents owned. On it, *Gunsmoke’s *Festus (Ken Curtis) sings an ode to his mule, “You’re Nothing But A ‘It’.” I can’t remember if I asked my parents about why a mule is neither a “he” nor “she,” but an “it,” or looked it up in the World Book encyclopedia.
(The song itself is available for review on YouTube, but I’ll do everyone a favor and not provide a link.)
I grew up on a farm, so I found out pretty early even though we never had one. I don’t remember how it came up; maybe it was when my parents talked about plowing with mules.
I think was that wonderful summer of 69 on the farm.
Wait, that’s not what you meant is it?
Are you an Aggie? 
Late teen, maybe? I didn’t read much Encyclopedia Brown as a kid.
I was thinking about starting a thread like this, about commonly known facts (like, fourth grade facts) that passed you by until adulthood, prompted by a conversation I had a few months ago with my older sister that I had never heard the word suffragette until a couple of months ago (I’m 29). She found this stunningly weird.
