ℂ𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕒

People wonder why I'm so obsessed with donkeys. I've looked into it, and my only finding is that the rest of you are underdoing it. The donkey was built for the ground where everything else gives up. It lives on thorn and scrub that a horse would starve beside, climbs rock on hooves like chisels, cools itself through those ears, and can lose nearly a third of its body weight in water, carry on eating, then drink 25 litres in three minutes and walk off as if nothing happened. We tamed it 7,000 years ago in the dry country of East Africa, and it has been the animal of the hard places ever since. So it was the donkey, long before the horse, that carried civilisation on its back. One of Egypt's first pharaohs was buried at Abydos with ten donkeys laid in graves beside him, every spine worn from a lifetime under loads. The grain, the salt, the copper and the news of the ancient world moved at a donkey's pace, and wherever a hill is still too steep for a wheel, they still do. The same animal fed our babies. Donkey milk is the closest milk on earth to a human mother's, Hippocrates prescribed it, and the foundling hospital in Paris kept a stable of jennies so the orphans could be put straight to the udder. A fair share of Europe's abandoned children owe their first month to a donkey, and most of those donkeys carry a dark cross down the back and across the shoulders, which the old story says was given to them on Good Friday. It carried our wounded too. On the beach at Gallipoli a stretcher-bearer from South Shields found a stray donkey, and for 24 days the two of them walked up and down Shrapnel Gully under fire bringing broken men down to the boats, until a machine gun got the man. The donkey went back up with the next one. Of everything the Anzacs brought home from that campaign, the thing they chose to remember was a donkey. Then there is the stubbornness, the one fact everybody is sure of, and it is the opposite of the truth. A horse meets danger by bolting, which is why horses die on cliff paths. A donkey stops, looks at the thing in front of it, and makes a decision, and it will refuse to step into water it cannot see the bottom of because it is right not to. For 7,000 years we have been calling a risk assessment an attitude. Put one in a field of ewes and it appoints itself. A fox or a loose dog comes through the hedge and the donkey goes at it, head down, front feet first, and keeps going until the thing has gone. Nobody trains that in. It decided they were its sheep. It remembers a face and a field after 25 years. It will stand over a dying companion for a day. It lives to 40 and outlasts half the people who ever owned it. There are about 50 million of them alive, carrying water, firewood and children for the poorest people on earth, and close to 6 million a year are now killed for their hides, boiled down into a gelatine sold as a tonic. The animal that did the most work for the least thanks is being melted into a wellness product. Seven thousand years of hauling us uphill, feeding our orphans and carrying our wounded, and the best we managed in return was to turn its name into an insult. So no. Not nearly obsessed enough.

The farmer down the lane borrowed Nelson for his ewes on Wednesday, and had to take the horse as well, and by Friday morning forty Welsh ewes had worked out which of the two was in charge of them and it was not the one you could see from the road. He had lost two lambs to a fox last spring and did not intend to lose any ewes to a dog this autumn, and he had read, like everybody has read, that a donkey in with sheep sorts it. He rang up. The Denbighshire farmer said yes, and then said that the donkey did not travel without the horse, and the man down the lane, who has a four-acre field and a small trailer, went quiet for a moment and then said he would make two trips. Nelson walked down the lane on a headcollar. He has never needed a trailer for a lane. He walked at Nelson's pace, which is the pace of a man who has read the terms, and went through the gate into a field of ewes who had never seen a donkey, and the ewes did what ewes do with anything new, which is bunch at the far end and stare. He walked the boundary. All of it, nose down, stopping where he judged there was a reason to stop, the whole fence line and both hedges and the gap at the bottom where the brook comes in under the wire, and he stood at that gap for a while. Then he went to the middle of the field and stood there. Hector arrived an hour later in the trailer, seventeen hands of Cavalry Black coming down a ramp into a field of sheep he had no idea what to do with, and the ewes, who had been easing toward the donkey all morning in the way sheep ease toward a thing they have decided is safe, scattered to the hedge again at the sight of him. He stood in the gateway looking enormous and lost, until he found the donkey, and then he walked over and stood four feet off the donkey's shoulder, and the field settled, and that was the arrangement. The man down the lane watched it from his kitchen for three days and says the same thing happened every evening. At dusk the ewes drifted in from the edges and lay down in a loose ring, and the donkey stood in the middle of the ring with his ears going, and the horse stood at the edge of it, which is to say the horse was being guarded too and had not noticed. The fox came on the second night. The man did not see it. What he saw, at six on Friday morning, was fox prints in the frost coming under the wire at the brook gap, forty yards into the field in a straight line, and then stopping, and turning, and going back out faster, in longer strides, with a set of small round donkey prints following them to the wire and no further. Nelson was in the middle of the ring. The ewes were asleep. Hector was asleep on his feet beside them, and had, as far as anybody could tell, slept through the only thing that had happened. A donkey does not guard because it is told to. It guards because it has looked at a field and decided what in it is his, and then it stands in the middle of that and declines to let anything through, and a ewe knows the difference between an animal that has decided and an animal that has been put there. Nelson came home on Saturday. He walked up the lane with the man beside him and did not look back once. The ewes stood at the gate and watched him go until he was round the bend, which the man says they have never done for him, and he has fed them every day of their lives.