Paccombe team's blog

Roger has been at the Sanctuary since 2006 when his owners kindly retired him from beach work. He is such a character and likes to be involved with everything we do.

Some of you may have read one of our previous blogs about a donkey called Spider. For those of you that haven’t, the story started in 1979 when a four month old foal called Spider came into the life of the late Dr Elisabeth Svendsen.

She wrote about him in a book called In Defence of Donkeys and this is how Spider's tale began:

Some of you may have seen the previous blogs on our little cat ‘Posh’. She lives on one of the yards with our elderly and laminitic donkeys. The yard in Spring Boxes is like a little sun trap and catches the sun for most of the morning (when we get any!) which is perfect for our elderly residents as it warms up their joints and they love to bask in the sunshine.

Meet Murphy, he came to live with us in 1995 and soon fell in love with a lady donkey named Faye. Wherever Fay went Murphy would follow. He would even stand and watch her eat. He loved her that much. Faye was like a two headed donkey; Murphy stood so close to her you could hardly fit your hand in to put the head collar on either of them.

Throughout her life Thyme has been a girl with many different 'boyfriends' - she is loved by absolutely everyone who comes into contact with her. Both human and animal. She has been at the Sanctuary since 1983! Bless her. You may notice that Thyme has a bent ear and if you look closely you can see scarring on her muzzle.

Hi everyone, my name's Jen Littley and I thought you might like to know a little bit more about how we decide which donkeys go out to new foster homes.

Here at Paccombe Farm we have two large groups of about 170 young male donkeys to select potential foster donkeys from. Once we have chosen suitable candidates they are given a thorough health check by our vet and handled by our foster co-ordinator to have their temperaments assessed to enable our welfare team to match donkeys to specific . I am lucky enough to be involved with this process from start to finish and it’s one part of my job I enjoy the most.