by Jon Katz
Maria and I had talked to vets and farriers and donkey lovers about the acclimation process and were told more or less what we had guessed ourselves. Simon and the girls should not be thrown in together suddenly. They needed to get used to one another, to sniff each other and get everybody’s smells straight. We planned to open up the side doors of the barn in the daytime and let the three of them check one another out as much as they wanted.
The barn permitted the three to be much closer than simply looking at each other from their different pastures. When Simon was stronger and two or three weeks had gone by, we would put them all together.
We knew donkeys well, and we had talked to other people who understand equines. Horses and donkeys are not, as a rule, gentle to newcomers. There are days, even weeks, of biting, kicking, bumping, and edginess over food.
Simon was gelded, but he didn’t know it, and when the girls were in heat—they had not been spayed—there would probably be some excitement. Donkey romance is not gracious or delicate—there are no roses or poems or walks in the parks. It is also common for donkeys to greet newcomers by turning and kicking them in the head.
Around ten A.M., we checked on Simon, gave him his meds, and then opened up the barn door. Lulu and Fanny were waiting at the gate, peering through the slats, their heads down. Simon walked quickly into the barn and then, eyes wide, walked up to the fence. The girls and Simon sniffed one another for the longest time. Lulu’s ears went back, but Fanny’s didn’t. Simon stood preening near the gate. We came back a few hours later and they were all still where we had left them. In the late afternoon, everybody got hungry. Lulu and Fanny went back up the hill to their pasture, and Simon went out to his corral to graze. We closed up the barn, enough for that day.
In the evening, I came out for my final check on Simon. He was standing up on the rise behind the barn, looking up the hill. Lulu and Fanny were in the pole barn staring back.
I heard Fanny’s soft bray, and then Simon’s louder response.
Simon seemed different to me. He seemed more alive, more intense. His eyes had a sparkle and focus I hadn’t seen before. His chest was puffed out a bit.
I was excited for him. A donkey’s life was not complete without the presence of other donkeys. And Simon could use some romance in his life. I worried a bit about the girls. They had led picture-perfect lives to this point. They had been raised in a clean and beautiful barn by a knowledgeable breeder and had come to Bedlam Farm when they were both quite young. They had acres of pastures to roam, hills to climb, brush and rocks to stand on and explore. Every morning they came down for their treat; every afternoon they consented to be brushed.
They guarded the sheep faithfully and tolerated the border collies chasing the sheep around. In the seven years that I had had Lulu and Fanny, no fox, coyote, or stray dog had entered our pasture or taken a sheep. And Maria and I had both spent countless hours sitting with them, brushing them, sharing donkey daydreams with them. As our friends often joked, it was a perfect arrangement for them—plenty of grass, no men.
It was in the natural order of things for them to be with a male, though, and natural enough for Simon. The sniffing at the gate went well, but we really couldn’t know how it would go when all three were together.
I liked to think that Simon was getting his family back, both in donkey and human terms. But we had learned many times not to make any assumptions about what animals would do. There are plenty of animal experts around—lots of people who know for a fact what animals are thinking, what they will do. And there are even more animals around to demonstrate that they are unpredictable and unknowable. It is clear what they will do only when you see them do it.
Three weeks later, Simon was stronger. His coat was growing in, the blackened patches on his skin receding. His legs were a bit bowed and funky, but they were getting him around. He and I were taking daily walks around the pasture, and I soon hoped to graduate to the roads and the woods beyond the pasture gate. He was off all of his medications and free of the need for salves and ointments. The rest of his healing was in the hands of time and nature. There was no question he would survive; it was time for him to live a normal life. By now, I was posting the “Call to Life” videos up on the Internet several times a week, and many thousands of people started their day with Simon’s bray.
It was a rare day he didn’t have visitors. Simon was a ham. He loved a crowd and almost any kind of attention. It was time to take him out of his corral and out into the world. To live with the girls.
So early on a Sunday morning, we opened up the pasture gates. Simon looked up and then walked slowly up the gentle hill and through the open gate. Lulu and Fanny were up in the pole barn, staring down at him.
I noticed that he was moving toward them, but the girls were not rushing to him. Ken Norman, our farrier, had counseled us on Lulu and Fanny’s attitude toward Simon. It would be simple, he said. “We are the queens. He is just Simon.” Ken was, as always, prescient.
Maria and I stood at the base of the pasture looking up as Simon approached the girls in the pole barn. He started toward Fanny, head down and sniffing. Fanny turned toward him, then slowly spun around. Without moving much, she kicked him squarely in the head with both hind feet. We could hear the thump all the way down the hill.
Donkeys use two tools when they challenge, attack, discipline, or fight—their teeth and their hind legs. They can easily kick right through a door. Once when a stray dog had crawled under the gate and entered the pasture headed toward the sheep, I saw Lulu charge the dog and grab his leg in her mouth. She flipped him about fifteen feet in the air, then turned as if to kick him. She didn’t have to. He took off out of the pasture and down the hill.
Simon seemed startled by Fanny’s kick, then shook his head, as if shaking off a horsefly. He moved toward her again, and she kicked him in the head again.
Then Lulu came up to Simon, turned around, and kicked him on the other side of his head. Simon stepped back a bit but didn’t retreat. He didn’t seem especially rattled. It was almost as if he had been expecting it. This, I was told, is a donkey’s way of saying, “Hello, welcome to the farm.”
It was not easy watching Simon get kicked in the head, and Lulu and Fanny each did it several times. This was their way of saying, “Okay, you can live here. We will put up with you, but don’t get too friendly or too close.”
As it happened, almost every one of Simon’s mornings began with his getting kicked in the head by Lulu or Fanny, or both, and after a few months, it just became part of the farm routine.
Having ministered to Simon’s many needs for months, and watching him struggle just to stand up, Maria and I found this kicking ritual hard to witness. In fact, it was almost impossible.
For a few days, we stood at the middle gate with apples and lured Simon back into his corral, just in case he needed some respite from his new barn mates. He didn’t, really. This was another human projection—another faulty human perspective on the animal world. From the first, Simon wanted only to be with Lulu and Fanny, and after a few nervous days, we did what we always tried to do: we let them work it out.
SEVEN
The Theater of Chance
I was walking Simon down toward the path one afternoon when a minivan pulled past and slowed. A woman rolled her window down and looked at Simon, and asked me “Is that a mule?” No, I said, mules are hybrids between horses and donkeys; this is a donkey.
“What does it do?” she asked. I was uncharacteristically at a loss. Simon gawked at her, hoping, as he often does with strangers, for a carrot or an apple, or even a scratch on his nose. His ears went straight up at her high-pitched voice, his eyes wide.
It goes on walks with me, I said. Disappointed and puzzled, she rolled up her window and drove off. “You are a ghost,” I said to Simon, “a myth, you don’t really exist for most people in America.”
What does it do? I kept wondering what a good answer might have been. A good question, it requires a though
tful answer. A few years earlier, I might well have asked it myself.
We kept on walking, the donkey and the wanderer, two of the oldest clichés in the world. This is what he does, I thought. This is what donkeys have always done.
I can’t blame people for not knowing much about donkeys. Why would they? It is a commentary on our time that few people have ever seen a donkey walking around, as they do in so much of the world and have for so many thousands of years. We don’t love our history; we are too busy coping with now.
Simon’s ancient ancestor is the African wild ass, Equus africanus asinus; the “Equus” signaling that donkeys belong to the horse family. Domesticated in Egypt or Mesopotamia circa 3,000 B.C., they’ve been working animals ever since. A male donkey is called a jack; a female is a jenny, and today there are more than forty million donkeys worldwide.
In their book Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus, authors Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison point out that artists have long viewed donkeys as “spiritual companions in an ethereal realm of life and death; the donkey equals man in the theater of chance and is equally a part of that divine force in the universe.” The idea of this equality, this partnership, speaks to the very particular place donkeys have held in our imagination. “The theater of chance” is an apt term for the donkey’s dramatic, arduous, and adventurous journeys with men. The theater of chance is nothing more or less than life itself, erratic and unpredictable, filled with love, hope, opportunity, disaster, illness, war, and uncertainty. Every day, we enter the theater. Every day we learn what is in store for us.
There are many representations of donkeys in our collective cultural history, but few set the tone more than the legend of Jesus Christ and his small and ungainly donkey. How much of the story is true? Jesus was known to ride a donkey on his travels through the Holy Land, but as for the rest, I have no way of knowing. I do know that this legend changed the lives of donkeys for all time.
The story of Jesus and his donkey is perhaps the first recorded rescue of an animal by a human. Thousands of years old, passed down largely by word of mouth, the story has shaped some of our deepest feelings about the care of animals, and created a template for the bond between animals and humans that still exists today.
A poor farmer outside of the city of Jerusalem owned a sickly donkey too weak and small to do much work at all. Few farmers could afford to keep animals that do not work for them or earn money. Over time, he grew increasingly angry at his donkey, telling his family he couldn’t afford to feed such a worthless creature, as the donkey could do him no good at all and was not worth the feed it took to keep him alive. He was thinking of killing him, he announced.
His children, who dearly loved the little donkey, begged their father to keep the donkey alive. But the farmer held his ground. “It’s wrong,” he told his children, “to sell an animal that can’t do a good day’s work.”
The farmer’s oldest daughter came up with a suggestion. “Father,” she said, “let’s tie the donkey to a tree on the road to town, and say that whoever wants him can take him for nothing.” The farmer agreed. The next morning, he walked the little donkey out to the road in front of their home and tied him to a tree. He could not, he said, imagine anyone wanting to take such a worthless animal, even for free.
Many people passed the little donkey and walked away. It seemed as if no one wanted him. Then two young men appeared. They looked at the donkey and, without hesitation, asked if they could have him. The farmer, an honest man, told them the truth: “He can carry almost nothing,” he warned.
“Jesus of Nazareth has need of it,” replied one of the men. The farmer had heard of Jesus, the great teacher, and he could not imagine what need of the donkey he might have, but with relief, he turned the animal over to the two men.
They took the donkey to Jesus, who stroked the grateful animal’s face and then mounted it and rode away. So it was that on the day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus led his followers into the city of Jerusalem riding on the back of a small, quite ordinary little donkey.
The donkey loved his master and devoted himself to him, carrying him everywhere, following him everywhere he went, even to Calvary.
When Jesus was nailed to the cross, the legend goes, the donkey repeatedly tried to approach him, as if to carry him away to safety. At the sight of his master crying out in agony, the donkey brayed and rushed toward him, but was brutally beaten back by soldiers and by people in the cheering crowd.
The donkey was poked and prodded by spears and swords and pelted with stones and rocks. Grief-stricken at the sight of Jesus on the cross, the donkey tried again and again to come closer, but was driven back each time.
The donkey turned away and hid in a nearby alley but would not leave. It was then, says the legend, that the shadow of the cross fell upon the shoulders and back of the donkey, and there it stayed for all time, imprinted on the backs of donkeys to this day.
It is this story that seems to have first cast the donkey as the spiritual and long-suffering companion of human beings.
Today, donkeys continue to labor, often thanklessly, on behalf of humans. They come in all shapes and sizes, and several different colors. They live in deserts, on mountaintops, in villages and on farms. While the classic image of the donkey in Renaissance paintings is sacred and powerful, the modern image of the donkey is less lofty. When we see images of donkeys at all, they are generally hauling freight around some overcrowded village.
The relatively few donkeys that live in America are either working as guard animals, protecting sheep and alpacas, or living as pets of “gentlemen farmers,” often keeping high-strung horses company.
Donkeys have a great reputation for stubbornness, but it seems to me this trait is misunderstood. Donkeys may owe their survival to their willfulness; they are believed to have a stronger prey drive than horses and a weaker connection with man. It is difficult, if not impossible, to force or frighten a donkey into doing something it perceives to be dangerous for whatever reason.
Some of this resistance can be eased or even eradicated by trust. Once a donkey gets to know and trust a human, it will often go along with reasonable requests. They are curious and eager to learn, but they seem to have seen enough of humans to be cautious around them. This is something many struggling species have not figured out, and it has probably saved many donkey lives.
I’m drawn to the Tao of the donkey, their inner and dominating spirit. There is something mystical about them. They are loyal, affectionate, intuitive, hardy, patient, stubborn. They are also unique among domesticated animals in that they work and live closely with humans, and become powerfully attached to them, but they never turn themselves completely over to us. There is a part of them that is beyond us, that they won’t surrender, a kind of dignity and independent spirit that most domestic pets have lost in order to survive.
There is no other animal I can think of that has been awarded such a spiritual aura by human beings. Donkeys are not just tied to Christianity; the donkey is also frequently portrayed as a loyal, wise, and enduring animal in the history of Judaism, in both the Old Testament and in the Kabbalah, the journals of the Hebrew mystics.
In the Kabbalah, donkeys are the wisest of living things; they often appear carrying prophets and mystics who challenged bewildered rabbis about the teachings of God. Often, the donkeys are overworked or mistreated and neglected by their masters, but they are important symbols of faith, suffering, wisdom, and commerce. Whenever they appear, ideas are exchanged; wise men and prophets are on the move. Donkeys are often used as stand-ins for the poor and unfortunate in the Kabbalah, and God and his prophets and angels are always exhorting people to treat them well.
Artists as diverse as Shakespeare, Chagall, and Orwell have all been drawn to the symbolism of the donkey and featured the animal in their work. Donkeys have been portrayed in famous paintings carrying Hannibal, Napoléon, and Queen Victoria on their backs. A donkey is the subject of the only novel in Latin that has survived complete f
rom the era of the Roman empire. Asinus Aureus by Lucius Apuleius (born A.D. 124) features a protagonist who becomes a donkey and experiences the hardships and simple faith of that animal.
One of the most original literary works ever conceived, The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is also a great work of donkey literature. Published in the early seventeenth century, Don Quixote features animals who take political or moral positions; their actions speak to their nobility, weaknesses, and strengths. Like humans, they are imperfect creatures filled with contradictions.
In Cervantes’s work, animals are not background characters; they are significant protagonists. Two of the book’s four central characters are equines: Don Quixote’s old horse, Rocinante, and Sancho Panza’s beloved donkey, Dapple.
Without Rocinante and Dapple, Don Quixote is hardly a book at all. In the globe-trotting satiric commentary, the two equine companions are mirrors of the men who ride them into every imaginable predicament and misadventure. From battling giants who assume the form of windmills, being beaten by liberated prisoners, and falling for one Dulcinea after another, to wandering through wild and inhospitable mountain ranges, Rocinante and Dapple get them through.
Dapple’s donkey diaries are one of the most inventive creations in literature—a chronicle not only of Spain in the seventeenth century but also of human beings who reveal themselves to be the sum total of many lunacies, great dreams, lost loves, and weeping hearts. Dapple endures, loves, rises and falls, lives and dies with every twist of the human’s fortunes. It is the donkey who defines the man who rides him.
This then, is the theater of chance: man turning himself over to the loyal animal, trusting him through unimaginable challenges, confiding in him as a trusted soul mate.
