vukovich

[vukovich]

The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of "cute donkeys" and came up with my head full of things I didn't know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.

Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.

The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:

Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that's about the single thing they're better at than a mule of the same size.

So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.

Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule

But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That's because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it's easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.

Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it's arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it's shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.

The Poitevin mule

This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.

With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they're very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.

The Poitevin Mulassier

Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.

The Baudet du Pitou

[vukovich]

[vukovich]

So I knew that one of the rules of Wild Mushroom Safety is to cook all wild mushrooms before consumption, but I didn't know quite how vital this was:

And it turns out, scientific literature doesn't know much either. Apparently uncooked morels can be /super/ toxic, and there's not a ton of awareness.

Anyway the Rules of Wild Mushroom Safety as I was taught them:

ID every specimen you plan to consume.

Cook.

Try a little and wait a bit, because people can have allergies to random mushrooms.

Do not mix with alcohol, adverse reactions can occur.

#I eat suspicious shit but not wild mushrooms #morels aren't that good #there #I said it

[vukovich]

:(

[vukovich]

a quick step by step guide on what to do if you come back to your apartment and find yourself locked out because your front door is frozen shut

kick the bottom of the door for 10 minutes

text your landlord

remember your landlord is on vacation and also in her mid 50′s so it takes about 36 hours to receive a response

briefly wonder why the fuck you moved the canada

remember that college tuition is significantly cheaper here than in the united states 

look up and notice your cat is at the window, staring at you. he paws at the window lightly and meows. it’s devastating. his eyes are so big and imploring. decide that you have to get inside your apartment at all costs. not even god himself can stop you from feeding your cat his chicken wet food dinner. frida kahlo herself could descend from the heavens and ask “hey you wanna bang?” and you’d say “hell yeah but first let me open this door so i can feed my cat his dinner”

remember there is a starbucks 3 blocks down the street from you

enter. the barista gives you a weird look for entering a starbucks at 7pm on a tuesday

order a venti cup of hot water. you order in french because the barista just said “bonjour” instead of “bonjour, hi.” you have a strong american accent. you hit the r in merci a little too hard to compensate. you embarrass yourself.

exit the starbucks clutching the massive cup of hot water in your hands. it’s burning your fingers.

return. methodically pour the starbucks cup of water all over the the door frame. it begins moving a little but still wont open

back up

ensure your doc martens are properly gripping the sheet of ice covering the ground. many people have told you to stop wearing doc martens in the winter, despite your protests that theyre actually the ideal winter boot. also, you’re a lesbian and punk’s not dead

release a pterodactyl screech and sprint towards the door, slamming the full force of your pathetically tiny 5′2″ 110lb body into it

you dont know any of your neighbors so you dont care about maintaining your pride anyways

the door swings open

run up the stairs

open the actual door to your apartment and yell MOMMY’S HOME MY LITTLE BITCHASS BABY BOY DONT WORRY at your cat

cat flings his body to the ground and starts purring like he does every time you come home

write tumblr post

[vukovich]

I’m so emotional about dinosaur stuffed animals,,, there are these creatures, extinct long before any of us were alive, but we found their bones and their eggs and their footprints. And we made drawings and models of what they could’ve looked like. And we made them into stuffed animals so we could hold them. We made them soft so we could love them. I’m sobbing

[vukovich]

[vukovich]

I can't believe you blocked me, just because I read everything you said in bad faith with open hostility.

[vukovich]

This is so wholesome

[vukovich]

[vukovich]

this is so dumb

#welp #this wins the internet #everybody go home

[vukovich]

Draco: Are you flirting with me?

Harry: My hand is around your throat, Malfoy

Draco: That’s why I asked

[vukovich]

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.

#the last time I danced in a gay bar it was 2pm and it was a funeral #nobody wants those stories

[vukovich]

happy 420 and day i reserve a spot in hell

[vukovich]

ok I just wanna say if you see a kink on tumblr or wherever that really turns u on and then you try it irl and it doesn’t make u feel the way you hoped it would THATS OK!! You can let that kink live in fantasy!! There are a lot of things that turn my brain on that I don’t enjoy during actual sex!! Isn’t human sexuality interesting!!

[vukovich]

I’m dying to know…

And before you @ me for calling these ‘cringe’… I made the ‘all these things that I’ve done’ for just me because I have, in fact, done all of these things

AND been criticized for doing all of these things 🤷‍♀️

It’s all just for fun babyyyy

#all #absolutely all

[vukovich]