PRATIE PLACE

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Donkey escape artist (not mine)

Jethro is limping today - I have the farrier coming at 5:30 am tomorrow to see why. Here, a story from one of my donkey lists.

My one horse and now one of the four donks will open anything that is not secured to the point of ridiculous.

I put good chain locks on all the gates. They responded by taking the gates off their hinges.

I drilled the hinge pins and put cotter pins through them. They pulled the pins and took the gates down again. I've had to turn all cotter pins so that they cannot reach the closed end and wire the open ends so they can't just push them out.

They decided to jump the four foot fence. The fence is now five feet high.

Luckily their only interest seems to be in playing and/or coming to the house to see if some of their people will come play with them. They only want to come to us, not actually 'escape'. We headed for the paddock, scratching ears as we went and everybody, donks, horses and ponies just followed us right back into the paddock. It was an object lesson in the value of building those relationships of trust and escape proofing the entire property.

I thought the donk was going to crash the fence. Then, when he cleared it (he rattled it good but not so as to throw him off) I was fearful he would be injured on the landing. Instead he was all excited and trotted around quite proud of himself - his only interest was in coming to me (and showing off). I wish I'd had a camera.

Anybody else have a flying donkey out there? Are they known for jumping abilities or did he just have a moment when he got caught up in his play with the horse? He and the horse also play 'tag' and I didn't know donkeys were that fast or exuberant.

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