Google’s Boston Dynamics may be in the holiday spirit — as well as the news cycle — with their robotic reindeer display that went viral the other day, but their crusade to make (their) mechanical animals staples of the battlefield slipped mightily on Wednesday.

Their $32 million dollar project that attempted to usher in a donkey-horse droid, aka a robotic mule for the United States Marine Corps, is being shelved or ahem, “stabled” for now. The manmade four-legged creature with the capability to lug around more than 400 pounds of gear, born in 2010, caused a raucous during tests and exercises, and that’s merely one of its many problems that ultimately forced the Pentagon to say “happy trails”.

This from the Ottawa Citizen:

There was an issue of repairing the robot in the field when it broke down. The robot’s gas engine also sounded like a lawnmower. “As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself,” Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Marines Warfighting Lab, recenty told Military.com. “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.”

After an adjustment in the form of an electric motored-mule failed to display enough muscle (it could only carry 40 pounds), the bot beasts of burden were put in storage — according to a report by Military.com.