At The Donkey Sanctuary, we pride ourselves on cultivating positive, strong and healthy relationships between donkeys and humans, helping to raise their welfare standards and their status in society.
Here, we share a selection of stories that celebrate donkeys as wonderful sentient beings and show how the generosity of our supporters helps us work towards exceptional welfare standards for donkeys worldwide.
A journey to remember
At The Donkey Sanctuary, we work hard to promote lasting and mutually life-enhancing relationships between donkeys and people. Donkeys are highly intuitive animals and by spending time in their company, people can develop their life skills and wellbeing.
We offer Donkey Assisted Activities (DAA) sessions across our sanctuaries in the UK, bringing people of all walks of life together with our donkeys for ground-based activities. Sessions may involve interactions with donkeys, participation in mindfulness activities, or specific coaching support to develop awareness of emotional and physical wellbeing.
Here, one of our supporters describe how Donkey Assisted Activities helped them take huge strides in managing their low self-esteem and anxiety:
“I was referred to do a six-week placement at The Donkey Sanctuary. I had been experiencing very high levels of anxiety and low self-esteem due to ongoing complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.
“Over the six weeks I learned so much about myself through interaction with these wonderful and insightful animals and with the gentle support of the staff. I soon realised that if I was masking my anxiety, the donkeys could sense my emotions and would themselves behave as if unsettled. I worked with Leo and Harry who, although a bonded pair, have very individual personalities.
“Leo would react to my anxiety in a very attentive and affectionate way while Harry appeared to be unsure and would keep his boundaries until I learned to explore my emotional energy and use mindful breathing exercises to regain my equilibrium. Having become somewhat adept at masking my true feelings, it was a challenge for me to accept and express how I was feeling in order to change my emotional state. Once I began to do this, my journey with Harry could begin and I feel it was a learning journey that both Harry and I went on together."
Supporting Peru's donkeys
In many places across the world, donkeys play an integral part in daily life, helping to support families and their communities.
In Maras, Peru, donkeys are an integral part of daily life as they support their owners on their smallholdings. The scenery is stunning, but life in this area is harsh, and families only earn a modest living from their smallholdings. Climate change has also started to have negative impacts on the everyday life for donkeys and their owners.
The challenges faced by the people of Maras directly impact their ability to provide their donkeys with the required level of care. This situation became even harder during the Covid-19 pandemic when there was a lockdown.
Through a fund established to help donkey owning communities navigate through the challenges caused by Covid-19, we launched a project with Innovar y Compartir, a non-profit organisation which supports and works with Peru's rural communities.
The project provided 49 families with training on improving their animals' diets and supplied them with enough seeds to grow into fodder to support 172 donkeys for a whole year.
With heavy rain, hailstorms and frost becoming more commonplace in the region, the project also helped to provide more than than 170 donkeys with shelter, allowing them to enjoy better living conditions and provide owners with a space to monitor their donkeys' welfare.
The project also helped to address the challenge of accessing veterinary care faced by the donkey-owning communities. Six new local 'donkey welfare ambassadors' received training and access to basic medical kits. These ambassadors now run treatment days, where they can tend to multiple animals for free, and have become crucial in helping to promote donkey health and welfare best practices.
While the project primarily aimed to address the immediate impacts of the pandemic, it also helped us develop an understanding of the needs of the local people and their animals and begin to establish how to create lasting improvements through education and empowerment.
Pioneering feeding aids for young foals
Sometimes, an improvement to welfare standards comes from a simple idea. This was the case when we developed a pioneering suckling system to help the natural development of orphaned foals in our care.
As foals are dependent on a milk-based diet for at least three to four months of their early life, there is a significant cost and resource implications for equine sanctuaries such as The Donkey Sanctuary.
Ben Hart, our Senior Lead Behaviour and Human Behaviour Change, explains: “Although rare, orphaned foals are one of the greatest challenges to equid care and welfare. Hand rearing is often the only option for equine sanctuaries when an orphan arrives. However, too much inappropriate handling from humans can result in behavioural issues as the foal grows.”
The groom who came up with the concept had experience in the agricultural sector and took inspiration from an artificial suckling system used to rear new-born lambs.
The artificial feeding system is simple, consisting of a plastic tube leading from an enclosed milk bucket to a lamb bottle teat attached to a stable door at an appropriate height. A Heatwave Milk Warmer heats the feeding formula in the plastic tube as it passes through the machine.
The automatic feeding system not only allows the foal to self-administer and potentially feed more naturally, but research also shows ad lib feeding may also promote healthier growth and development.
With the introduction of a camera, the system has also allowed for 24-hour monitoring. Our monitoring teams have observed foals participating in other activities that replicating their natural feeding behaviour, including head butting the teat, chewing or rubbing the teat and staying close by even when not feeding. These behaviours are considered to be non-nutritive suckling and similar to when foals stay close to their mothers in the first five months of life.
Ben Hart concludes: “Developing this artificial feeding system, which mimics the natural environment, is a great example of how team collaboration, academic excellence and lateral thinking can significantly improve not only the health, welfare and behavioural development of donkeys in our care but also equines around the world who can learn from our pioneering work.”