25/06/2024
This is tragic for this donkey. I know my opinion won’t be popular because you can’t think heartwarming and fuzzy when you know the facts, but Here I’m saying it:
So many people have sent this “heartwarming” story to me. Finally I’m getting a moment from equine care to sit down and write WHY this is a tragedy for Diesel, far from heartwarming and “he’s living his best life”. He’s simply surviving as best he can. And here’s why:
Like our wild horse Oso who fell out of a trailer on a remote Oregon highway, whom we tracked for over two years before finally capturing him, Diesel has aligned himself with small bands of elk to stay safe. Safety in numbers. Oso did the same. We tracked Oso for two years, on foot, horseback, and by air, and we always saw him on the fringes of small groups of elk. This was how Oso survived for over two years on his own, he even “spoke” elk and deer. This was not his chosen life, he had been cruelly taken out of the wild, the only life he knew, been abused and failed by humans, but retained very strong survival skills. However we knew Oso would eventually succumb to the elements or a predator, because he was essentially on his own. So is Diesel. What pains me deeply is that Diesel is a donkey. Donkeys are desert animals, suited to dry foraging and not to surviving harsh winters. They don’t do well on high sugar spring grasses, but elk do. We have rescued enough donkeys and mules who were turned out to “live their best lives” on thousands of acres ranches in dry Eastern Oregon— think SWHR’s Geri Donkey with his 40 lb roll of collapsed neck crest and metabolic issues including PPID—Cushings. He’s on meds for life and we can do nothing about his neck. Heat and cold temperature swings are hard for him due to his metabolic condition, and that’s with the best of care and medication. Molly Mule to whom we had to back up our trailer to the spot along a miles-long fence line where she stopped walking—with her foundered slipper hooves, infections in her eyes, and incredibly high level of PPID—Cushings. We ended up having to put her down. She was only about 20, had been turned out on 2500 acres to live out her life. Mikey Mule, pastured for years, with slipper hooves and the worst arthritis we’ve dealt with—the list is long. Diesel is a desert animal who has been abandoned in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. This is a heavily forested, canyoned, rugged, grassy, and extremely wintry environment in which a donkey whose coat does not shed moisture like a horse’s is left to survive. He’s aligned himself with elk to survive. They alert each other to dangers and predators. But elk are well-suited to the topography and weather here— they can run vertically up and down mountains, which donkeys cannot do. They can withstand temperatures well into the minuses, with precipitation, which donkeys genetically cannot survive. And they don’t succumb to equine maladies which result from high sugar diets of rich grasses, which a donkey most assuredly will. Dying from insulin or metabolic conditions is a slow and horrible process. A slow demise. It begins with laminitis, then founder, once the hoof-pain sets in, the equine can’t keep up with a herd of elk, can’t move around so easily, so they can’t keep their hooves naturally trimmed, so they develop slipper hooves. Their metabolism goes wonky, developing huge pockets of fat deposits around their body. When PPID sets in, they can’t shed their winter coats, they feel horrible, they slowly succumb, very slowly—and that’s if a predator doesn’t take them out of the game of life. Diesel has youth on his side—for now. But this also means he has plenty of time to build up metabolic issues in his donkey body like the donkeys and mules we’ve rescued, who were turned out in their teens—the “gift” of retirement into the wild and a cruel gift that is. Our county sheriff considers that abandonment. Diesel would be living his best life if he would have been abandoned in the desert where he could join donkey herds and spend his long life foraging a proper diet with his own kind, not trying to survive in the mountains on the fringes of elk herds. He needs to be brought in— that is the reality of his sad situation. Shame on his owners for accepting a fate that they caused, and actually celebrating it. He is not living his best life. He’s doomed.
A donkey that ran away from his California home five years ago was recently found alive, living with a herd of wild elk.
