Forever Home Donkey Rescue

We picked up "Diego" this afternoon. Everyone should have a name & Diego sounds good to me. As you can see from the picture he isn't quite a bad boy we had been told. He was more cautious than confrontational & after getting 2 front feet in the trailer, decided he wasn't going any further. So John & Tom, the man with him above, locked their arms behind his hind legs & literally lifted him the rest of the way into the trailer. He never once offered to kick.

When we got home I called Ann at Care for the Horses & got more of the story. He came in with an elderly horse with some bad hip problems & is really lame. Ann said if they tried to do anything with the horse, Diego would charge them & kick. He has not kicked one time since we picked him up, so maybe all he was trying to do was protect his friend, which they read as aggression.

He is spending the night in the trailer, because it was dark when we got home. Tomorrow John is going to build a small pen around the back of the trailer, so he can go out. I hope this isn't a mistake. A temporary pen of corral panels, is only a good idea, if they don't REALLY want out. Chili & Gus are always moving the corral panels around to suit themselves...........!!!! We'll leave his food & water in the trailer, so he will have to go in to eat & drink. Maybe by Friday the trailer will be no big deal.

We had a visitor this morning. Valerie has been reading the blog & web-site for quite sometime, but this was the first time we had met. I think she knows more about the blog than I do, at least she seems to remember more of the details.........!!! (G) She even has a favorite donkey from reading the blog..........my wild child, Miss Tula. Guess she likes a challenging type of personality.........!!!!! She's an equine person, so we went thru the pens. Usually when we have people visit we go around the outside of the pens, because we don't know the level of equine knowledge in a group. But she was by herself, so it was more fun to go in with them. It's been awhile since we've had any tours, & believe me, they were ready when they saw her coming with a cup of timothy pellets. Most of them were fairly polite, although we did have to tie Gus up. Since he is not in a pen, he thought he should be everywhere we went & seemed to have forgotten the rule about "personal space of humans".

We've had to keep Chili, Buddy Brat, Rocky, & the minis from going over to Burroland for awhile. When John went over last week to check for mesquite beans, he didn't find many, so he closed the gates to keep the cattle out, & we started opening Burroland at night. BUT, after 2 or 3 days we noticed a build up of mesquite beans in the poo. Seems like they are better detectives than John, when it comes to finding beans. Buddy looked like he gained weight almost overnight, & when I started looking at some of the others they didn't look much better. They are really "ticked" about the injustice of being in their pens all night, & voice their displeasure every chance they get. But we can barely hear them, if we're in the house........!!! (G) They do get out during the day, but they've almost completely stripped everything edible on the 10 acres around the house, so I don't think that's much fun. We'll watch the poo of the ones that are out at night, & when we don't see anymore beans, we'll let the "chubbies" out at night again.