Caring For Your Donkey

Living Together
Donkeys are by nature a herd animal that needs the company of at least one other donkey. A single animal will be lonely and as a result will be very noisy.

However, great care should be taken when selecting your donkey's companions. Ungelded males (jacks) are very aggressive, and may even kill other donkeys that are in the same paddock.

Even when mature jacks are gelded, they may not lose their aggressive behaviour.

For this reason and for absolute safety, NEVER keep jacks in the same paddock as jennies.

There are two reasons for this:
  1. they will repeatedly mate with the jennies, regardless of their maturity and readiness for breeding
  2. they will attack other males in the same paddock
It is extremely important to remember that donkeys living in a paddock is not the same as donkeys living in the wild.

In their natural habitat, donkeys live in herds with one dominant male jack at the head. When the foals are born, there is a system of jennies who protect the young girls from the jack until they are mature enough to begin breeding. In a paddock situation this is impossible, and risks the health and safety of the jennies.

As a general rule, jacks can be mixed with geldings, but NOT if jennies are also there, as they will see other males as competition, and will attack them.

Jennies and geldings do make good companions.

If you are not sure, or have any other questions, please don't hesitate to contact us as we would be happy to advise you.
 
Pasture
To keep hand feeding to a minimum, each donkey needs approximately one acre of pasture. Pastures should always be inspected for poisonous plants, especially ragwort. This should be removed and burnt as it can spread rapidly. Any rubbish should be removed from the paddocks.
 
Feeding
Hand-feeding will have to be done in the middle of winter and summer and should consist of one biscuit of grass-hay per donkey morning and night.

Although donkeys look very pretty in grassy paddocks, this type of unsupervised feeding can be dangerous. It is important to remember that the desert is the natural habitat of the donkey and therefore, because of the sparseness of food, they have to walk many miles each day to fulfill their dietary needs. Grassy paddocks can provide too much food and very little exercise. An overweight donkey can develop laminitis, causing lifetime problems with abscesses of the feet, or could even die.

It is therefore important to keep a check on the weight of your donkey. This is best done by a weigh band, which can be purchased at any grainfeed store. For management of the thin or the fat donkey please read Donkey Business 3.

There are a number of foods that are dangerous for donkeys to eat, and great care should be taken to keep such food out of their reach. Donkeys do not know whether a particular food is good or bad for them: if they like it, they will eat it. Consequently it is the responsibility of us, their humans, to protect them.

Donkeys must always have access to fresh, clean water. This should be in a refillable container or bath. Drinking from a dam will meet the water requirements of donkeys but they will have to stand in mud to reach it. Even healthy donkey-feet do not cope with wet conditions, and foot abscesses can develop.

Donkeys also require a mineral lick placed near to their water supply so that they have an adequate source of minerals.
 
Shelter
Donkeys require access to a three-sided shelter at all times. This should preferably have a dirt floor both for the comfort of the donkey and for easy management. Brick or concrete floors are not suitable because they are so hard, and as most donkeys lie down when they are sick, a dirt floor is kinder and more comfortable for them.

Cleaning is easier and faster too: brick or concrete floors must have straw laid on them, which must be cleaned out twice a day, whereas urine will soak into a dirt floor (without causing an odour) and only the donkey's droppings need to be removed. The dimensions of a shelter for two donkeys are ten feet wide, ten feet long and ten feet high.

Donkeys either love shelters and stand in them constantly, even in forty degree heat, or they avoid them like the plague, but either way a shelter is a necessity: it may be needed at a moment's notice if the donkey becomes ill and needs to be nursed in a dry and safe situation.
 
Fencing
Donkeys are escape artists and so secure fencing is mandatory. Either post and rail or pig-netting are good forms of fencing.

Post and rail fencing should have four bars, with the bottom rail less than forty-five centimetres from the ground. Pig-netting needs to be tensioned correctly. If the bottom of the wire is allowed to become slack a donkey will get his foot caught, leading to injury.
 
Handling Your Donkey
Your donkey should be groomed, have its hooves picked out and its eyes cleaned, at least once per week. This serves two purposes: first, it helps to form a bond between you and your donkey; second, it enables you to make a thorough examination of the donkey, so that if there are any problems they can be detected at an early stage, enabling treatment to be applied as soon as possible. Thus not only does this routine makes your donkey look good, it is also a sure way of maintaining its good health.
 
Transporting Your Donkey
When transporting your donkey it is important to make sure it is safely secured in the float, to avoid causing it serious injury.

The donkey should be tied with a short rope to the cross bar, and the central divide of the float should be solid: if it is not, there is a danger that during the journey the donkey may go down and roll underneath the bar, resulting in it breaking its back on the cross bar when it tries to stand up. If the divide is not solid, it should be tied to one side.

It's also useful to have 'bum pads' on the backboard: being shorter than horses, donkey backsides make contact with the backboard and can get rubbed raw during even a moderately bumpy ride.
 
Donkey Health Care
Feet: A farrier should attend to your donkey's feet every 12 weeks.
If the hooves are not kept trimmed, they will just keep growing (as Seamus' did), making it difficult for the donkey to walk. Eventually the donkey will develop deformed, painful foot joints, and even when the feet are trimmed the joints and tendons will still be deformed.

Some people may wonder how donkeys in the wild manage without farriers. The reason is that donkeys kept in paddocks do not do the constant travelling that wild donkeys have to do in their search of adequate food and water, and consequently their hooves are not subject to the same wear and tear that keeps wild donkey-feet to a healthy length.

By domesticating and owning donkeys we then become responsible for maintaining their feet for their entire lives.
 
Internal parasites: Donkeys should be wormed every 12 weeks. This can be done by you, your farrier or your vet, using a horse-worming paste.

Donkeys are at risk of having about five or six types of worms, which they get from eating grass and hay.

If not treated, these worms can kill the donkey by either causing it to starve to death, or by causing it to haemorrhage as a result of burrowing through the donkey's intestinal wall and rupturing blood vessels.
 
Vaccinations: Inoculation against Tetanus should be done by your vet, who will also advise you when it should be done.
 
Teeth: Donkeys should have their teeth examined by an equine dentist every 2 years.
Dental care is extremely important, especially of the back teeth. Donkeys use these teeth to grind their food, and without them the donkey will either starve to death, or get colic as a result of bolting its food, which could also lead to death.

Please contact us if you need advice caring for donkeys with teeth or mouth problems.
 
External parasites: Donkeys are always at risk of lice infestation. The life-cycle of lice is three weeks, and so delousing with Pestene powder should be done every three weeks, between April and September in Australia.

The powder should be sprinkled in a line from the top of the mane between the ears to the base of the tail. It is not necessary to apply the powder to the entire body, as the lice move in a circle around the body of the donkey and will eventually pass through the treated area.

Lice seem to be attracted when a donkey is dying, so if you notice a large number of lice on your donkey, despite regular delousing, it could be a sign that something is wrong, and your vet should be called.

Flies are another problem for donkeys, and seem to especially like biting them around the legs. They can be kept away by spraying equine fly repellant on the donkey, but this should not be done near its eyes. Use a roll-on repellant around this area.

Back