Thanks for the heads up. Yes on the map the road (and there’s only one) looks very twisty.
In the western movie ‘Two mules for Sister Sara’ starring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine I remember this dialogue reflecting on a trading a mules for a burro.
Not being conversant with the ways of West, I was puzzled by this cultural reference. But I guess a mule, which is hybrid of a horse and donkey, is much more valued beast than a burro/donkey/ass in the arid areas of rural Mexico. So to trade a burro for a mule before a journey over difficult terrain would be seen as a particularly poor bargain. To be fair to MacLaines’ Sister Sara character, she may not be much good at trading livestock, but she does later reveal herself to far more adept at maximising her own value in the Wild West.
I guess mules have greater value because of their load carrying capacity?
All right, it’s a small shrine, let’s make it a small prayer.
Buenos dias, hermana. You see, Mr Hogan, what a little prayer can do? The Lord provided a kind gentleman who accepted my mule for this creature of God. Now I can still be with you. Your mule for that burro? If that kind gentleman traded you even, you won't be meeting up with him in heaven.
A similar story was told in the Vietnam War about a missing Huey helicopter, per Robert Mason’s excellent memoir of his experiences flying Hueys in that war, Chickenhawk. I’m sure it’s happened long before those two incidents too. Ships lost at sea seem an obvious application.
For the OP, a significant advantage is mules/donkeys require significantly less forage, pound for pound—roughly half, according to the following cite—and said forage can be lower quality as well. See, this article on feeding horse versus donkeys, at Stable Management.
Has anyone yet clarified that while mules are crossbred and almost always sterile, donkeys are, in fact, normally occurring animals? They are. They were domesticated millennia ago but they breed normally.
In addition to the many, many posts about the physical benefits of a mule versus a horse in work, I think it has to be emphasized that they eat WAY less. In a developing nation, that’s a big deal.
I wonder if this could be referring to a case of mule/horse chimerism? A female horse could breed with both a male horse and a male donkey, with two fertilized ovum resulting, one of which is a full-breed horse and the other is a mule, and the replicating cells then merge to create a single offspring. When I Googled this possibility, I found a few articles that mentioned a mule giving birth, and that 3rd generation foal was found to be a chimera, so chimerism does appear to occur in equines. If the cells of the reproductive organs were primarily full-breed horse, that chimera mule could breed with a horse and produce a normal full-breed horse foal. Could chimerism be one of the main explanations for the rare mules and hinnies that are able to reproduce?
That sounds plausible. The articles were magazine type articles and there hadn’t been actual research into the mechanisms.
I know that as female cats develop, their proto-skin cells have to choose which X chromosome to use, the one from the mother or the one from the father. Which is why only a cat with XX chromosomes can be calico. An XXY cat can be calico and look male, but it will usually be sterile.
When I read the mule articles, I assumed something similar was happening, but that it was statistically unlikely for enough proto-reproductive cells to be from the father or the mother to be significant.
Chimerism is a more interesting explanation. There could be experiments.
That raises an interesting question about the “Tradition” number in Fiddler on the Roof. Tevya tells us the story of the dispute between two of the villagers over whether the animal in their transaction was a mule or a horse. But if mules were forbidden to Jews, how would there even be a question allowing for the possibility of a mule in Anatevka?
Or is this one of those things where they could have a clever workaround, like buying a mule from a goy and it’s okay, because a Jew didn’t breed it?
My very Jewish grandmother’s favorite food was ham. Let’s just say Jews are humans and don’t always behave the way they should.
I checked three online sources and found five answers. 
However, most say, although you are not allowed to deliberately breed mules (or allow a gentile to breed them for you), you are allowed to keep a horse and a donkey in the same corral, and you are not required to separate them if they do mate. And you can make use of the resulting animal. (Other sources, however, you can’t use or buy a mule.) Maybe Anatevka had a liberal rabbi.
And then the rabbi said to the priest, “It’s a lot better than ham, isn’t it, Father?”
Maybe the forbidden nature of mules was precisely why the animal’s species (or pair of species) was important: The owner insisted that it was a horse, and thus allowed, rather than the forbidden cross-breed that the neighbor insisted it was.
Well, he WAS open-minded enough to construct a blessing for the Tsar…
Could we use that same blessing on Trump?
Let’s keep political commentary out of GQ.
And for a sewing machine.