Talk:Hinny
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Encyclopedic Style
I did what looks like an extensive rewrite, but did not remove any prior contributions -- though they did get moved around a lot, in order to establish a reasonable flow of information with appropriate subheads. Added internal & external links & "see also" section to direct readers to closely related wikipedia articles on donkeys, mules, etc. Still needs more revision to achieve encyclopedic style and be fully wikified. Lisasmall 11:20, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Prodded by the unsigned note "Enough mule" below, deleted hefty portions of prior contributions because they were mule-specific without being sufficiently hinny-germane. Also was bolder about deleting repetitive material. -- Lisasmall 06:27, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
Why Hinnies Rarer Than Mules
According to How They Do It, the reason hinnies are difficult to obtain is that jennies refuse to mate unless they are beaten, and stallions don't normally have to fight mares. -phma
- That may be a factor, but growing up in farm country, I understood it to be that when you have two species with a significant size difference, the hybrid should be borne by the larger species. It's easier for a female horse to deliver the large hybrid foal than it is for the much smaller female donkey. (Maybe -- I'm guessing on this part -- if the How They Do It explanation is true, the size of a male horse might frighten the female donkeys into kicking up a fuss.) But so we're not relying on my memories of my rural youth, for verification, I dug a little further and came up with this from here, http://www.lovelongears.com/longearlingo.html , the official site of the American Donkey & Mule Society, which offers this page as "Official American Donkey and Mule Society Terminology" :
- Hinny: This is the term used for the hybrid animal produced when the female ass (jennet) is mated to the male horse (stallion) to produce a foal. There are both male hinnies and females. The genetic inheritance of the hinny is exactly the same as the mule. * * * * For all purposes, hinnies are classified with mules. Hinnies do not differ from mules in endurance, or other useful traits, but are bred more rarely because the donkey dam tends to make the offspring smaller.
- The same site notes that while American fanciers refer to female donkeys as jennets, breeders in the United Kingdom call female donkeys mares and save the word "jennet" for what Americans call a hinny. Hmm. Further crossbreeding info I'd never heard before, in the same paragraph from the same source:
- Donkeys do not as readily conceive to horse stallion as to donkeys. 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.
- This verifies what the original Wiki-author put in the article about the chromosome / fertility issue. Lisasmall 08:11, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Pathetic fallacy
I edited out this: "Nature prefers the chromosome match-up to occur ...." This is an example of the pathetic fallacy. See Bad Science: pathetic fallacy.--Indefatigable 13:43, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Enough mule
This article seems to be a lot more about the mule than the hinny... a lot of references are for the mule rather than the hinny. Though you can make the argument that they're genetically the same, it's rather odd to read an article on the hinny based off mule information.
- Good point. After another edit today, I think that the mule references which remain are necessary. By necessity, mules will be discussed a lot in the section on differences between hinnies and mules. In the fertility section, there were a few anecdotes about fertile mule mares but they seemed necessary as a context for the rarity of the fertile hinny mare in China. I cut some of the least-relevant (and mule-exclusive) anecdotes and cleaned up the language throughout the section to try to make the relevance of fertile female mules to fertile female hinnies more clear. -- Lisasmall 04:47, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
- On that point, where the mule is mentioned, the article is often in error. As in where it says that mules have donkey coat colors. They don't, they have horse coat colors -- see the Wikipedia article on mules. The reason for this is that horse color genetics are dominant over donkey color genetics because horses have been specifically bred for those dominant factors and donkeys have not. The same thing happens if you cross a domestic horse with a Przewalski's wild horse, unless the domestic horse is a dun. Donkeys come in several colors but most are either just dun or modified dun. Hinnies and mules are usually colored like their horse ancestor, modified by the (usually) dun heritage of the donkey parent. One of the horse colors you don't usually see in mules is palomino because it is a heterozygous condition caused by crossing a chestnut with a cream. Even so, there are palomino mules because there are cream donkeys. I don't have ready references for this info but much of it is available on Wikipedia. Halfelven (talk) 04:33, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
Genetics
It's been a while since my genetics classses, but I believe the portion pertaining to the percentage of horse or donkey genes passed on is misleading. It states that the mule will pass on 100% maternal horse genes; however, due to recombination of DNA during meiosis, a certain amount of transfer between maternal and paternal genes occurs. This means that the largely horse based genetic material will have some characteristics from the donkey. This is how offspring obtain unique characteristics, and may more closely resemble close relatives other than their parents. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Halogenated (talk • contribs) 01:48, 19 January 2007 (UTC).
equine offspring will not grow larger than the mother
Ok, English is not my first language so I may be misunderstanding this, but in any case it's confusing. If it means what I think it means (taken literally), it can't be true -- if equine offspring doesn't grow larger than the mother, then new equine generations would either be getting shorter or possibly (although improbably) maintaining the same size. If a male can't grow larger than his mother and females are usually smaller, this means they keep getting shorter. Am I missing something or this is completely wrong? PoisonedQuill 17:02, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
The hinny should NOT have a scientific classification. It is not a species because it is an infertile creature. If someone has any reason to call it a species, start explaining, because my college textbook (Essentials of the Living World/Chapter 12.4 ISBN 0-07-305238-8) says that according to the Biological Species Concept, the species need to be reproductively isolated. They are unable to interbreed, therefore not a species.