Long Ears

Daisy and Lucy, 2 weeks ago

Around here we love donkeys. No one more than Kohen. I think the original fascination for them came from watching mommy surf the web and drool over mini donkeys. This is the boy as a 2 1/2 year old, viewing a horse or stock trailer would proclaim, "a donkey trailer!" He still calls them donkey trailers! I'm excited to say that for Christmas his daddy bought him a toy Dodge Ram pulling a stock trailer. Of course mommy had to fill it with toy donkeys!

Picking out Hee-Haw, 3/29/08.

Cut to yesterday morning. We headed to church to attend the Sunday School Christmas Program, Mary had a Little Lamb. It was the story of a small spotted lamb named Tiny at the birth of Jesus. One of the characters was a donkey, played by the granddaughter of Don Simonson, our local small town webman. Don runs a wonderful website that details happenings, history, birthdays, etc, in our small town. If you are bored and want to find out what's happening in a small town of 600, 90 miles south of the Canadian border in Minnesota, click here. Anyway, Anna and her family recently moved here from New Zealand. So picture this cute little girl with donkey ears and a New Zealand accent. It was great. Kohen would watch the play and kept chanting, "donkey, donkey, where's the donkey" whenever she wasn't on stage.

Fuzzy Daisy.

We currently have three donkeys. Hee-haw a five year old jack, Lucy-a 5 year old jenny, and Daisy, our 4 1/2 month old beauty. Yes, I called a donkey beautiful. Hee-haw and Lucy were purchased last spring at an exotic animal auction, and Lucy was bred when we bought her. She is about the poorest specimen of a donkey. Scrawny legs, horrible hooves, and she obviously did not have a pleasant life before we acquired her. It took us months of gentling before we could even get near her. She still is not overly fond of human attention. Our plan is to downsize to one or two donkeys come spring. We have long talked about getting rid of Hee-haw, but Kohen loves him and he is a great donkey. Tame, gentle, and boy can he bray! Kohen loves to head out to the pasture with a brush and spend time with his donkey (supervised of course.) My current thoughts are that we find a new home for poor Lucy, and get Hee-haw gelded, but don't hold me to it. Daisy has been raised with sheep since the minute she was born in the sand under a pine tree. She does great with them, even sleeping in the sheep shelter as a posted last week. Thankfully she must have inherited some good genes from her dad because her conformation is much better than her mom's.

Daisy at one day old.

This last picture is not one of our donkeys, but a mini at the petting zoo. Along with the donkey is Brody and Amber. Amber loves mini donkeys even more than us, so she had to be included in this post