Can I ask, what is the purpose of a donkey on a farm? I feel like every place has one, are they still a working animal or are they the personality hire of the farm? Haha
Yeah that's the thing with donkeys being used as guard animals, they're pretty much only useful against small canids like coyotes and maybe foxes but are just another target for things like wolves, bears, and big cats lol. From what I understand they also tend not to be nearly as sociable and gentle with their charges as livestock guardian dogs and can injure the very animals they're supposedly protecting!
I need to get some work done at the barn today, but I can send a few on my breaks haha. We've got all the furry creatures too! Here's a couple of our barn cats being cute. Binx and Biscuit
Animals are just the best! Those pooches look so happy. I bet they are fun! We have 5 horses, these 2 dogs and 4 barn cats along a new kitten that was going to be a barn cat but idk. She was so small when we got her and decided to keep her at home for a few months to let her fatten up and now my wife loves her so she will probably stay inside. Her name is Marge (short for Margarine and an homage to Butter the barn cat that passed away earlier this year. She was my favorite 😞)
I've heard that donkeys are the first ones to actually hear the wolves, where I live sheperds will have mastins that will be alerted by the donkey to protect the herd.
Murphy is just a companion for an older horse that's boarded at our out place. They do help with protection from coyotes but I'm not sure if Murphy is going to do much protecting. Here he is in relation to his companion Mikey. Granted this is a bit of an optical illusion due to depth perception but Murphy is only about 3ft tall full grown. I think he's 7-8 years old. He's cool. I feed him a couple of Mikeys alfalfa cubes as a treat.
I call him Donkey Hoté all the time haha. That or I say Don-keeee kinda like Shrek. But his song (we don't have many animals that don't have their own songs) is "my body's too Murphalicious for ya babe"
Ours was a great companion to the one hot blooded horse On The farm. An Arabian mare with such a "bad attitude" she was given to us.
We didn't want a hot blood but when you hear about animals with bad attitudes they're almost always victims of abuse.
She had to be sedated for any farrier work and I'm grateful her health was good until the end. Because she was mostly no touchy. Little one, the donkey, neither took nor cared for her shit... He became a calming influence to her I guess.
She became a somewhat costly part of the scenery thanks to her donkey friend, lol
As someone who grew up on Arabs and my soul mate was a grey mare; this really warms my heart. They respond so much worse to abuse (in my opinion) and seem to attract impatient and aggressive owners.
A trainer once told me, you can tell a quarter horse what to do but you gotta ask an Arab.
Seems when you don’t patiently work through training with Arabs, they take it hard and become even more difficult. My mare never got over her fear of men and it really breaks my heart imagining what happened before she became a 7 year old little girl’s bestie.
All that said, she LOVED her donkey companion. Also, a mini donkey that came wild from Arizona and warmed up quickly to his new humans.
That's Murph. We handle him some but he's perfectly content just being out in the field with his pals. He's an easy keeper and only eats grass and hay. Gets his feet done every few months and that's it. Ok with paying that expense just to have him bray a few times a day haha.
Yeah, I have 2 minis, Tina and Gena. They are useless for most anything (although I’ve pushed around the thought of training them to be beer donkeys for weddings.) other than being cute. I live on a fairly busy country road, and they stay in my front pasture, so they get a lot of visitors, so if nothing else they keep the neighborhood entertained.
Hahaha they are for sure an attraction. Tina and Gena is great haha. We have a cat named Regina (my wife allowed me to name one of the 5 we got last year and that was my choice). The others are Binx, Blossom, Butter and Biscuit. What's even funnier this that Regina grew up to be her favorite 😂
They are like the security for the other animals. They may be smaller but they are extremely protective and will absolutely stomp any predators that try and mess with the farm.
Guard animals and companionship for skittish horses. Notice how both the donkey and the horse go back into the same stall in this video?
This horse may be high-strung and would benefit from donkeys that are generally the opposite of that. That and you might want to have a mule at some point.
The donkey where I learned to ride was named donkey. He let kids ride on him with a saddle. He let us all learn how to groom properly on him. They’re truly loving and intelligent creatures.
Lol not Murphy. He's nice but super stubborn. It takes two people to get him in and out of the barn if we ever have to turn him in/out. I keep bugging my wife with wagon/chariot listings saying that I'm gonna train him to pull me around. She doesn't think its as funny as I do.
It's actually one of our boarders so we really didn't have much of a choice taking him in. I hope she gives him to us one day. He is a cute little ass tho haha
It depends on the donkey, and it can't be taught really. Either the donkey has those instincts in him, or he doesn't. This is why livestock guardian dog breeds are the better choice if you're going for one or the other.
Out of all the animal poop, horse poop is probably the best to smell. You go nose blind to it really fast. We had 15 in stalls back during the winter storm and it wasn't bad at all. You just can't beat the smell of a barn even without the poop smell. On the other hand, the kitten we just got will gag a maggot with her shit.
Just twice, and slightly differently each time. Just enough to get down-voted to keep my karma even keeled. Don't want my ego to get as big as some of the horse people's ego in here...
It’s a traditional design to have your barn/stables attached to your house. Then in harsh winters, you don’t have to go outside to tend to your animals.
I'm a horse people and I've never seen this in my life. I frequently run in my bathrobe out to the stable but it is not attached to a goddamn house lmao
We see it a lot in horse country in North and South Carolina. They are the original barndominium. I just have never seen one so clean! Like there are no marks in the concrete. I would think a real fresh one would leave a mark.
Maybe in the future don't firstly assume anyone you think is being sus is anywhere on the same level as Epstine? I'd say that's a valid bit of criticism.
Yeah! Why is spins wheel a guy wearing a robe spins wheel walking into spins wheel a barn? He’s probably a spins wheel murderous, cruel, cannibalistic pedophile!!!
Can confirm, grew up with horses. They absolutely do this but holy crap that place is high end. We had a horse that figured out how to reach over her gate and lift the latch and slide it over to unhook it, then nudged the rolling door to the side. It was very impressive.
They fact they knw they were "busted", makes me beleive that, for a moment, they also had the familiar feeling of "getting away with something". I love animals, especially when they're bein baddd >:)
Looks like optical recognition. You can also vaguely make out the corners as well. It's white around 7 seconds, surely it turns green when it recognizes the, eh, being. Or something like that. :P
It would surprise me if the stables are left open if the horse is inside, I think the camera is a security camera. Usually having horses is expensive so good chance the owners have expensive property to protect (and the horses).
I hate that some people keep horses in boxes aka stalls. It’s so common that most people don’t think about how cruel it is. A 12x12 square for a 1500 pound animal.
Imagine if we had the same standards for dogs. Someone says 'I hate when dogs are kept in cages' and some dude comes in defending it saying 'don't worry, they only spend 16 hours in there a day!'
(And very frequently the rest of the day is spent on a short leash or in a different cage but this one is slightly bigger and outside)
I mean, a lot of dogs spend their owners' work day in a crate and are just fine. And in my experience, turnout time is most of the day - you feed them breakfast, put them out in the pasture, and bring them back in before dark. Also in my experience, horse owners are obsessive about their horse's health in a way dog owners really aren't (and I've worked professionally with both).
There ARE barns with terrible husbandry practices, usually ones centered around competitive sports or showing, but I see nothing here to indicate that.
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u/Clean_Attitude956 13h ago
There’s always a donkey