We purchased my mule Polly back in 1988. I had been talking “mule” for many years, ever since my teens when I rode on an organized trail ride with a severely crippled woman, who rode a mule. She had been told to give up riding, but instead bought a young mule, had it trained to lie down so she could get on, and fooled all the skeptics that thought she would never ride again. That was, as I remember, one of the nicest, calmest animals I’d ever been around. That’s where my story with mules began, and it has been one huge learning experience ever since.
Good or bad, I have managed to do many things with my mule because I simply didn’t know any better. At 40-something I decided that I wanted to learn to ride English. So, .I took her for lessons at a schooling barn that specialized in training Dutch Warmbloods, English riding and jumping. Nobody told me that mules weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. Looking back on it all, I was very lucky, because my mule enjoyed every minute of it. Actually, in those early days, I think that she may have thought she was a horse, and not a mule. We participated in schooling shows where she was the only long-eared critter. We got a few chuckles in the beginning, but those folks soon realized they had to take her a little more seriously as she got harder to beat. After all, who would want to admit that they lost a class to a mule! The important thing was that we enjoyed what we were doing, and we didn’t really care what anyone else thought.
Today, many years after the schooling ring, I still would rather hit a good old mountain trail with my mule-friend Polly, but we both have our memories of the challenges in the arena. As a matter of fact, I found that those old lessons could make an otherwise dull trail a little more interesting. We always kept ourselves motivated with leg pressure, bending and flexing…. out there in the woods it can be a lot more important than in a box with four sides.
