Donkeys for donkey’s years
In April I travelled from Suriname to Bonaire to do some voluntary work at the Donkey Sanctuary. Bonaire is one of the Dutch Antilles (a.k.a. the West Indies: located about 80 k’s off the Venezuelan coast) and was “discovered” by the Spaniards in 1499 (the natives being imprisoned and forced to work as slaves elsewhere). In the following century donkeys were introduced as beasts of burden.
In the 20th century, as cars and motorised tools took over all the heavy work, the donkeys had become redundant and were left to their own devices, expected to fend for themselves. Because Bonaire is a very dry island (almost all the food here is imported from overseas) this became an increasing problem. There is barely any food, water is scarce, there is pollution everywhere that ends up injuring and killing a lot of donkeys from tetanus, and last but not least, traffic injures and kills many many more donkeys.
In 1992 the Donkey Sanctuary was established to start helping these donkeys. Over the years the sanctuary has expanded and expanded and nowadays they are a 60 hectare property housing over 600 rescued donkeys. On the property are two volunteers’ houses, and one of them became my residence for a four week period.
donkeys trying to stare me into giving them food
With the house came two cats to feed and fumble, and every evening promised for a wonderful sunset over the dry cactus-grown plains.
The days were long and the work hard, almost 10 hours a day walking around, lifting heavy bales of hay, bags of pellets and shovelling donkey shit as well as talking to tourists, selling tickets and souvenirs, feeding all the animals and preparing their fruit and veggies (up to 6 containers a day, donated by the local supermarket). It was a bit of getting used to again after having done nothing for three - or so months. The hardest job I did before all this was dragging myself out of a hammock and into my bed.
During the time I was at the sanctuary there were 5 orphans that needed bottle feeding every three hours. They get a special formula of donkey milk that is flown in from Europe. During the day we feed the orphans, at night from 6 PM Marina (the owner) takes over, getting up at night every three hours to feed any orphans she has at any time. An exhausting commitment, I don’t think I could manage for so many years but she does it and she will keep doing it.
At 3 pm we (the volunteers) feed the orphans and then do our feeding rounds for the donkeys in the park. There are several special areas that get fed separately:
the mothers’ paddock: feeding mums with young foals that were injured in the streets,
the special care unit: weak, skinny, crippled or slow donkeys (generally from the main park) that need some extra care, medical attention and/or a bit of extra food,
the oldies’ meadow: 30+ donkeys (with the oldest resident being 45 years old),
The rest of the donkeys all roam freely in the park itself. Around 3.15 PM we head off in our little truck to start feeding them hay, fruit, veggies and bread if available (their favourite of all). There’s 30 troths and hay racks to divide this food into, and there is also a general feeding place where they get their breakfast every day, which we fill each afternoon with the remaining fruit and veg that didn’t fit into their troths. All in all they have it pretty sweet!
lots of donkey bums at breakfast time!
It is not just feeding fun for the volunteers; the park is open to the public at $7 per person (all of which benefits the donkeys) and they can drive through “safari style” and feed the donkeys carrots from their windows! People love it because the donkeys come running along with the cars, curiously sticking their cheeky heads into the windows in search of something to munch on.
It is not all fun and games though. In my first week there we picked up a little orphan that had been found roaming the streets, its mum nowhere to be seen.
It was taken to the vet’s office where it was given stitches (it had a big bleeding hole in its head) and a piece of its jaw was picked out like a loose pebble. Speculation that it had either been hit by a car or attacked by other (male) donkeys competing for food and gene pools. The little one was not very active, it was just lying around although we did get it to drink its milk every three hours. After a few days a small pussy wound started to appear on its nose and upon squeezing it out (and the poor thing was in so much pain!) a large flap of skin came off its nose. It must have been 3 centimetres in width and length and it exposed a large chunk of its bone! No wonder it had been so lethargic, it had been silently suffering for days.
It was taken back to the vet who cleaned it all up and told us to keep trying, it had a huge chance at recovering - even though we didn’t feel that sure at the time.
Almost immediately after the abscess was gone, the donkey started running and playing and became an active, cheeky happy little fellow! Only days later the once pussy, stinking wound had already turned a healthy red again.
The biggest challenge from then on was to keep its little nose clean because every time it got dirty it meant we had to pick into its sore wound again. And once it started healing, of course it started itching so the little guy started scratching it, meaning the bandages came off all the time. Fortunately Marina thought of the following ingenious solution which kept everything in place brilliantly:
Only two to three weeks later and the wound had almost healed completely! At one stage we had really thought we were going to lose this guy but he sure showed us all :) He now has a name too - Dabi.
Then there’s also Maroesja (pronounced Maroosha). Maroesja was found alongside the road as a little foal. Her leg was totally open and many muscles permanently damaged due to what has to have been a car crash - hit and run.
As she was slowly getting older she was compensating for her bad leg by leaning on her good front leg all the time. Because of this the good leg started growing crookedly as well. She now (1 year and three months after she was taken in) walks with great difficulty; a brace on her “good” leg and dragging along the bad leg, and slipping a lot. When she lies down she often needs help getting back up.
She is currently in the process of getting a new brace for her other, injured leg, and hopefully that should eventually help her walk with more ease. Either way it is awful to see her struggle on, it makes you wonder whether it is really worth while. Having said that, she is a very sweet and happy donkey and when she gets tired she jumps up on her hind legs so that you can catch her head and carry her by the head for a bit. This is not an easy task considering she now weighs 80 kgs - but it must be worse for her having to carry so much weight on two not-so-good front legs. She also really enjoys cuddles and being brushed so I guess as long as she is a happy donkey we should try all means before deciding on anything more drastic.
Whenever there is an injured donkey people ring the sanctuary (if we are lucky, they also have been known to leave injured animals suffering for days without caring) and the volunteers go out to try and help the donkey. Sometimes this means trapping it so that a piece of PVC, metal or barb wire can be cut off a leg, other times it means the best thing is to bring them in. Often donkeys get injured due to rubbish that is lying around and once such a wound starts getting infected it is often too late and they almost always need to be euthanised because they have tetanus.In my final week one donkey was hit by a speeding car who didn’t bother stopping (his angry wife called it in) and a day later we had to put down a donkey with four broken feet- a car had driven over its legs (how the hell...?).
Last week we got a call from the equally fabulous animal rescue centre Fundashion Kunuku Kakelvers (FKK) to say they had spotted a mother donkey that had stepped into a beer crate. The crate had moved all the way up its leg, stripped all of its skin off in the process, and due to all of this the foal (yes, it had a foal too) could not drink any more. We went over in an attempt to catch the mum and bring it and its young to the sanctuary but by the time we got there they had already disappeared.
In our search through the hot, dry, cactus-filled land we did find a box with three young kittens in it - purposely left there by someone to die.
We gave the kittens to FKK who will look after them until they are big enough to find them a good home. Unfortunately these kittens aren’t the only animals that are the victims of a cold heart. FKK has several traumatised animals (a dog that is so scared of men that it shits and pisses itself every time it is approached by one, a dog that spent the first 10 months of its life in a bird cage until the animal protection removed it from the property, a dog that was butchered with a machette by some “tough guy”... the list is endless).
As for the donkey mum, we fear it is only a matter of time for it to get infected with tetanus, it is a damn shame that we got there too late.
As for the donkey sanctuary, they are a non-profit organisation that gets all its income from entrance fees, sales in the souvenir shop, donations and their “adopt a donkey” sponsor scheme. Apart from a 20% subsidy for the animals’ food, they have to fund all medical, food, construction and lodgement costs themselves.
There are currently more than 600 donkeys in the sanctuary and a further 300+ still roam the island. Some people leave food or water out for them, other people injure them on purpose. Out of desperation for food and water they are lured to populated neighbourhoods: where there’s people at least there’s food. But there’s also a lot of debris, speeding cars and sadists, unfortunately.
The Donkey Sanctuary had a scheme for one year in which they castrated male donkeys, gave them a tetanus shot, tagged them and put them back into the wild. This makes them more mellow and more importantly: they can no longer reproduce (within the sanctuary all males have also been castrated) so eventually the donkey population will die out. Two hundred donkeys were treated this way. But then there is the Bonaire Donkey Protection League. They made it their mission to stop this project, because they feel the donkeys are part of the island’s heritage and it is unnatural to castrate male animals and them release them back into the wild (in my opinion it is unnatural for this introduced species to be here to begin with). They call the Donkey Sanctuary and its co-workers “Nazis” and make claims saying genocide is happening on the hands of the Donkey Sanctuary. When you check their Facebook page it is riddled with poorly researched, unjust and sometimes downright ridiculous accusations towards the Donkey Sanctuary.
They have unfortunately managed to bring a halt to the scheme to castrate the “outside” donkeys and even went as far as to ring up the major sponsors of the donkey sanctuary, telling them that they mistreat the animals, kill them without reason and have a very bad rep overall with as a result that several so desperately needed sponsors withdrew (says Marina).
I have spent four weeks full time living and working on the sanctuary, have observed how much food and care, love and attention they all get, I have seen how Marina operates, tirelessly heading out every time a person rings in a possible injured or sick animal in need. I know for a fact that this woman - thought I must admit she is a tad crazy - does everything she does for the well being of these donkeys. I was genuinely impressed with her drive, did often not agree with her way of thinking or acting towards or around people (and that is an understatement) but when it comes to the animals all she does is for the sole benefit of these donkeys and for anyone to say otherwise, they do really not have a clue what they are talking about.
