Everyone knows Raymond: Last mule living with Outer Banks wild horses

Raymond and his harem. Posted online by Patch.com.

This is some story. “One wild mule found alive among wild horses on Outer Banks”. Have you read it? It’s from The Charlotte Observer. By Mark Price. July 18, 2018.

---

He staggered off into an island marsh and vanished last winter, leading conservationists to believe the last mule living among North Carolina’s wild coastal mustangs had died.

But Raymond, as locals call him, proved too stubborn to go quietly.

Not only has the once-crippled mule re-emerged on Corolla’s beaches, but he picked up a harem of three mares.

“He’s sterile, but he doesn’t know it and we’re not going to tell him,” says herd manager Meg Puckett. “He challenged a much younger stallion for those mares and he won. That’s saying a lot.”

Even she thought Raymond had died after a risky last-ditch effort was made in November to save him. A group of specialists with the Corolla Wild Horse Fund drugged Raymond and literally sawed down his hooves, which had become so deformed he couldn’t walk.

“A domestic horse would not have survived. He was just too stubborn to die,” Puckett says. “It’s that ornery, stubborn side that has made him one of the best known of the herd. Everyone knows Raymond.”

Islanders took to social media recently to celebrate the return of “the mule who thinks he is a mustang,” as Ann Litzelman put it on Facebook.

See also “Last Mule On Outer Banks So Stubborn He Refuses to Die” at Patch.com who also posted the image above with their own story on Raymond.