This means Woyanne donkeys Addisu Legesse and Kuma Demeksa are living on borrowed time.
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The Wisdom of Donkeys
By Roger Lewis, telegraph.co.uk
My donkey Emily was murdered. Well, I say murdered – perhaps it was manslaughter. My brother was having a house built; a ditch was badly fenced and Emily fell in. She was hauled out and reprimanded for being too inquisitive, which I thought unfair.
The next day – the ditch still unprotected – she fell in again and drowned. I was abroad and to this day I haven’t forgiven those involved for their negligence.
I loved that donkey for 30 years – as did my mother, who kept a watercolour diary of Emily’s life. Emily had her own canary-coloured cart, was a fixture in nativity plays, would be put in fields with highly strung horses as a calming influence, and was served with a noise-abatement order by Bedwas and Machen Urban District Council because her bray could be heard for four miles.
When, with a £100 legacy from my grandpa, I bought her as a foal, she could be carried like a pet lamb. Not otherwise temperamental, when introduced to a potential suitor she’d kick the living daylights out of him.
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Therefore I can completely understand Andy Merrifield’s besottedness. When he rhapsodises about his donkey Grebouille’s swag belly, thick fur and the dung that smells of bran and barley, it all comes back to me.
Donkeys, says the author, can have a “profound presence”. Merrifield would spend hours watching them graze: it was “a sort of meditation, hypnotic and addictive”.
Before long, in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson, who rode a donkey in the Cévennes, or even Our Lord, who rode one into Jerusalem, Merrifield has taken his sacred beast to rural France. “We ponder, we wait, we meditate,” he says.
A lot of meditation goes on – but not much else, unfortunately.
The inscrutability of the donkey is praised again and again. “You can’t make a donkey walk faster. We have to learn to go at its pace.” The animals are patient, sensitive and intelligent. “It is hard to forget their innocent gaze,” we are told. A donkey has “the gravest and most reasonable eyes the world has seen”.
Apparently donkeys can get depressed and die of grief – or possibly of embarrassment should they read this book, with its pretentious imputations and fortune-cookie philosophy.
Merrifield pictures himself as a medieval troubadour, plodding around the Auvergne, with its fragrance of camomile mixed with wild lemon and thyme.
Apart from the fact that he’s “in serious need of a wash” by the end, we don’t know how long he’s been away – it could be weeks or a single afternoon.
In my experience, people who go in for the Confucian sage stuff, and are out to praise silence and slow time, are on the rebound from an impatient existence. So it proves.
“I’m no longer the same person I was before this trip,” confesses Merrifield. Until recently, he was an academic in New York (details are irritatingly vague), who has cracked up over “an iron in my soul”. He says that in his daily doings he “was nasty and rude and I enjoyed being nasty and rude”. Life became “too much to bear” – crowded sidewalks, pollution and screeching sirens. Merrifield was sunk in “a world gone awry, a world I’d already decided to shun”.
So he exchanges it for church bells, birdsong and the sainted, chocolate-brown donkey, which eats dandelions, thistles and “everything that stings”.
The book is at its best when outlining the history of man’s relationship with his ass. Though donkeys have been domesticated for 8,000 years, we have not treated them well.
In the Bible donkeys can speak with a human voice and see angels, but normally they “take the brunt of human ridicule” – and violence. Because they have a high pain threshold, people beat them mercilessly, trying to get a reaction.
While in the West donkeys can live to be 40, in Ethiopia, on average, they seldom live nine years, and in Egypt 11; in Kenya, Mexico and China they are lucky to reach 14. Owners use poorly fitting harnesses and heavy loads, which leave donkeys raw and bleeding.
After a life of slavery, the creature is tipped on to a rubbish dump “and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold”. In one horrifying episode, a farmer cuts a donkey’s ears off for eating a neighbour’s corn.
As Merrifield says, it is good to know that the Donkey Sanctuary in Devon campaigns against such treatment.
# If you are concerned about a donkey’s welfare anywhere in the world, call the Donkey Sanctuary advice line: 01395 578222.