Please Don’t Get a Donkey

This is an animal that will live 40 years, so we have to think long term. We also don't want to have a baby animal and ruin it for everyone else who has to deal with it for the rest of their lives. small farms get miniature

donkey

s because they have been promised online that they will make fantastic flock guardians, they are really very cute, but for most small farms

donkey

s are not the answer, friends, they are ready for their walks, come on, little friends. Here are a handful of questions you should ask yourself if you are thinking about purchasing miniature donkeys, firstly, what are you looking for?

Are you looking for a guardian of the flock? I will say that when we lived in the middle of the city when we actually had small wildlife potentially threatening our livestock, like foxes, raccoons, bobcats, hi and Bella, they were fantastic livestock guardians in that environment, it didn't happen automatically, it took quite a bit of training. , so the second question I would ask you is: are you ready to do it? You have resources to help you learn how to train a donkey because, like I think a lot of dogs and other things, a lot of training things have a lot more to do with training the human, the owner, than training the animal when I understood. and Bella, I had never had a dog or a cat before so I didn't really know what I was doing but I received Hola and Bella as a replacement after a failure with a rescue donkey that really broke my heart because I wanted to. my place would be the permanent home for the little halfy and unfortunately, just because he wasn't well equipped to handle it, we had to rehome him and for the second time, the way that failure made me feel really motivated me to want to do it. you know, approach future donkeys in a very different way, okay sir, it's not time for a snack, it's time to walk, this is the first time we've crossed this bridge, so, very brave, hello, sometimes, Hello, you have a little problem walking through puddles and passing mailboxes, not really. like Flags, he's checking to make sure Bella comes and he's really upset because she's getting all the snacks and he's not Bella, come on girl, but pretty soon we'll be on a smaller road and we'll be here, she's what I called Howdy's emotional support donkey.

Bella doesn't need to be watched that closely either because she will never be more than 50 or 60 feet away from Hola at a time and as soon as she realizes we're coming this way, she'll come this way. Delter Ray's friends filmed a music video in that haunted house over there, hey buddy, okay, hey, we're not going to eat the donkeys love snacks, they're very food motivated, in that way, like dogs, and talking about dogs is the only reason we walk. this path and not others is because we know that we are not going to find any dogs on this path and there is one of the many questions that we, as potential donkey owners, must ask ourselves is where are we, in a place where our donkeys that we believe that are going to be great.

The guards will be in danger from the big dogs because I'll tell you right now. My guard donkeys, who are fantastic. The guards have had several fights with dogs, in fact, whose ear was almost bitten off? one of our neighbors was a dog when he was younger and that has instilled in him a very extreme fear of dogs. I mean, we've been able to do exposure therapy with him to be okay with our three dogs that we have, but you know, kind of weird. the dog is a big trigger for him, oh here comes Bella, she's like Wait, don't leave me Bella, hey, I have to fix your little harness.

This is one of my favorite things to trick, hello, is to do this little thing called Bind the Ground, which literally just trick him into thinking he's tied up by doing that sometimes it works sometimes don't wait there buddy come here Bella hello buddy okay come here we go so the next question you should ask yourself is what is your land like because donkeys have however evolved to be desert animals for many thousands or millions of years. Its natural habitat is hard terrain with many sandy rocks. They are foragers, so they will eat brush and weeds and they have to like it. lots of exercise in high temperatures so you can find some of that scrub and brush to burn tons of calories donkeys will get fat from breathing air.

This was the big difficult learning curve for Howy and Bella when we moved from Washington to Tennessee. It's just that we have super rich, lush pastures here and by the time we got here, Hi and Bella started developing donkey diabetes because they were consuming too many calories, they were getting too fat, and as a result they were developing hoof problems, while in Washington were in dry land where not much grass grew. I fed them there separately from my goats, so I could control what they ate. My friend grew all kinds of different hay and straw, so I was able to get barley straw, which is pretty much what the donkey should eat because it's a low-calorie, but filling food.

The next question is: do you have access to a large animal veterinarian who has the ability to deal with donkeys or knowledge-based treatment with donkeys? willing to see donkeys, how are you going to take your donkey to the vet in an emergency situation? When Bella was little, we put her in the back seat of Adam's truck, but you know we can't lift her there anymore, so now if we have to go anywhere we have to go get the trailer and it's quite an ordeal, for which in an emergency situation that is not a very viable option.

Luckily, we have access to a really good mobile vet who will come and know all my animals and you know, the treats. They're really nice and everything, come on Bella, why are you taking so much time eating snacks like usual? The other thing is if your donkey is going to have a friend because I love him, hello, he is the love of my life, he was my first true animal love, but I have him as a lonely animal thinking that I could have him with my goats and that he would be totally fine with that, but he didn't actually join them, he joined me, which ultimately created some behavioral problems in him, some needed this. and other things like he would basically hear my feet hit the floor in the house in the morning and he would hear me talking and then he would start crying and we lived in the middle of a neighborhood and my neighbors didn't like it when a donkey cried. all the time because there is a lot of noise, so I had to get him an emotional support donkey, Bella, but it is also dangerous to get pairs of donkeys if you want them to join your livestock and protect them, because if you don't raise them all together It's Your cattle may not bond with cattle, they may just bond with each other and then they will only protect each other and not your cattle.

Donkeys are not lone wolves, they really thrive in a pack or team environment. Hello, for example, he is. older, he's bigger, he's been closer than Bella and he's definitely the leader there, but if the two ever break up, he's truly heartbreaking. The kind of herd dynamic between him and Bella is that he always walks in front and is constantly controlling. The same thing happens to her with animals, like he has favorites within our goat herd, like he has certain goats that he really likes. I will say that, at best, he tolerated them. He never liked her.

He was aggressive against them, but there were goats he would know. looking for and being especially friendly and wanting to spend more time with many people buy both miniature and full-size donkeys thinking that it's like a set-it-and-forget-it thing, as if all they have to do is bring the animal. At home, they put him in their pasture and trust him to take care of their animals and himself, but like any animal, if it is to be kept with mixed species, a certain amount of training is required, we are probably talking of six or 7,000 hours. from the time spent with these donkeys doing various things together over the last 7 years, which is also a big part of why I can ask them to do anything, why I can snuggle them, why they are good to me and their patient. wondering why they are mostly patient and do what I ask of them when it comes to work, another big question to ask ourselves is what their climate is like because donkeys in very humid or rainy climates tend to have a lot of problems in the skin and on the hooves, and you know.

All of those things are manageable but they will definitely involve a lot more time, attention and care than you are actually willing to give them. He's waiting for Bella, a funny little thing, even thinking like a donkey would think that halter training is a very important thing. I have done both with a single halter like this, but I have also trained to lead with two leads on each side, so we can work on his G word memory and he has left and right to give him verbal commands so he can pull the cart and pull. influence of a small farm and things like that Bella never grew up and so she is not big or strong enough to do much physical work, but she does a very good job of keeping Howdy in line and helping Howdy to be a much braver child of It could be.

Another big question to ask is how patient you are willing to be, because donkeys have definitely earned a reputation for being stubborn, but that's actually a bit of a misnomer. They are not stubborn, they are extremely intelligent and very cautious. As their owner, they must develop a relationship of trust with the animal that is basically entirely based on your ability to be patient with them, if you lose your temper and get frustrated or exasperated or start acting out of control, they will too and every time that If this happens, you will lose a little trust in your animal, which means it will be increasingly difficult to ask the animal to do the same thing again and increasingly difficult to ask your animal to trust you to do other things too.

Come on dude, he's really worried about Bella eating more snacks than he can right now. Come on sir, another thing I learned through observation with these guys is that if I do the typical human pull from the front, it's going to be very difficult for me to get it to do anything, however, if I just place my body slightly behind his hips here, then he'll know he can lead and it'll be a lot easier for him, you know. like quite confidently, like Forge forward, he walks forward, whereas if I'm trying to attract him this way, he'll be much less likely to do it with Obe if, hey, I'm not in a trusting relationship and I need him to know that I.

I'm the boss, I need to really develop a situation where I'm always the leader and he needs to pay attention to me and what I ask of him because so often I have him pulling me in a cart or pulling a farm implement. I've trained him to use his ears and his listening skills to behave accordingly, so when he and I go for a walk he lets him lead, but it's only because he already knows that I'm the boss. He already knows I'm in charge. He knows. He needs to listen and knows that he can't just go for a run without sufficient permission and this has also helped develop his cognitive thinking skills.

He needs to be a bit of a problem solver, but neither do I. I don't want him to decide when we're done driving the stroller when we're halfway home, come on Bella, stop snacking, come on girl, also on the trust thing. I don't punish him. I think of ways to discourage the behavior we don't do. We don't want natural consequences and we encourage the behavior we do want, it's actually a little embarrassing to go back and watch videos of me driving with Hello in the stroller because it's like you're a really good boy, Hello, you're doing great.

Well, very good boy, but if I got angry and took my anger out on him again, that would really damage our trust and hinder my ability to ask him to do difficult things, and I feel like there's a lesson in that for us humans. Also, if you watch closely, you'll see that I make frequent but fairly extreme corrections, like I'll get it back to where I want it to go, but mostly I keep a very relaxed tension on our RS. I want him to keep it, you know. walking forward so I don't want to pull on his leash because then he's going to say hey, stop, we have to stop again, we're so used to it because of my injury, but the more we practice like this, the easier it will be. anything goes and we tend to get a serious case of the Zoomies when we approach our door on the way back to the farm because he is always so excited to go see all the little charges of him when he gets back.

Another great question to ask is do you have access to a fairy or someone to come and trim their hooves, a lot of fairies won't see miniature donkeys because I mean a lot of people think of donkeys as the chihuahua of the farm animal world. , people buy them because they're small and cute and they're cuddly, but then they treat them like they're small and cute and cuddly and then they end up developing really serious behavioral problems and even though they're small, they're powerful, so you really don't want to have them. a donkey that misbehaves for you and for you. your own safety the safety of youranimals the safety of your family the safety of your fair but also even the willingness of said fair to come and trim their hooves one really important thing we should do right after trimming the hooves is to go out onto a flat surface and type of look and see how we did it we want to see if they're standing level what's going on with their legs like these these hind legs have a natural inclination to have their legs bowed towards the center behind their hooves Naturally, we use a lot on this inside part, so part of our trimming is that we always want to remove more material from this outside part to help encourage them to get their legs more out like this and up and down like this.

We also want to see it from the side, your toes grow faster and it's like in a situation with poorly trimmed hooves, you will have very long toes, which will make your toes, which protects this bone back here , they get shorter and shorter until they are literally just walking like on that bone, which becomes extremely painful and with their leg almost straight up and down, what is that angle? He seems to be doing pretty well, his toes were a little long and we are trying to fix some issues with the frogs. He has constant problems with his hooves due to his cousin Lemonius.

He is so fat, too many calories, too much sugar in the grass he eats, that is why we have moved him to a dry place, all these things it is as if the hoof is the first place that appears, so if you are thinking about acquiring donkeys, You basically have to become a hoof expert because our hooves are going to be like our first warning signs for other much bigger, long-term health problems and, again, this is an animal that will live 40 years. So we have to think long term, we have to make small adjustments over time to really have a solid, healthy animal that we have a very good relationship with, because I mean we have to be a good steward of this donkey, although I am a great defender. from rescuing animals I had a really negative experience with my first donkey I rescued and it ended in me having to rehome him which was heartbreaking because I wasn't well equipped enough or knew enough about him to be able to deal with the behavioral issues that he had, but also because I cared about him and wanted the best for him, you also don't want to have a baby animal and ruin it for everyone else who has to deal with it for the rest. of your life by not knowing what you are doing as far as training and other things, so this sounds a little morbid, but the best case scenario in my personal opinion is to find a donkey that was loved, that was well trained and that was a pasture friend for someone who died of old age.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but the thing is, these things live for 40 years and are very commonly adopted as pasture friends for horses and other wines because they fatten up on air, so they're cheap to feed and they're pretty easy to care for, no. They wear horseshoes like horses, so sparring tends to be a lot easier as long as they get the right diet, get enough exercise, and their hooves wear down naturally and they have good genetics and you know, those are things we go into. to think, but maybe a donkey is right for you, but

please

don't buy a donkey that is going to live 40 years and then make it someone else's problem because you made it.

I don't do it the right way, my grandfather always said that if you ever have a dog, you are buying a ticket to the worst day of your life and he was absolutely right, but I think of Hello as my first dog and I am very glad to have 40 years with him because 7 to 12 years with all my dog ​​friends never seems like enough, okay buddy, should we go home? Come on fat man lard let's go

please

take all my donkey advice with a grain of salt. I'm far from being an expert. I have learned a lot over the last seven years as a donkey owner, many of those lessons the hard way, but I have compiled much of my learning, from hoof maintenance to diet and even just the checklist.

Should I buy donkeys for my farm or not? I've put all of those things on my Squarespace website and Squarespace is a fantastic place for me to collect all my mini ideas and put them in one very easy to use, beautifully designed template that then shares all of these musings with the world. I can easily drag and drop everything I want to share with you and then share it and it's as easy as Squarespace just introduced a new feature. IM super. I'm excited because they now offer native course hosting on their Squarespace website, which for me, someone who teaches and creates educational content all the time is perfect and takes a lot of steps from my daily work life, and if you're looking to start a site Web. on your own, go to squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com anival trades and you'll get a 10% discount.

I hope you learned a thing or two about donkeys in this video and if you're interested in learning about alpacas, watch this video, you can click somewhere where it ends. I'll see you there, cheers, come on, hadti, come on, you want to have some Zoomies at home, come on, buddy, come on, Bella's really lagging behind, girl.