A pet donkey that escaped his owners five years ago in California has been found “living his best life” with a herd of wild elk. Terrie and Dave Drewry, of Auburn, are convinced the animal, filmed by a hiker earlier in June, is their pet “Diesel”.
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Diesel was spooked and took off during a hiking trip with Mr Drewry near Clear Lake, California in 2019. Weeks of volunteer searches proved fruitless, and a trail camera image a few months later was the last time he was seen…Then hiker Max Fennell spotted the herd earlier this month, describing the donkey as “happy and healthy”, and posted his film on social media…The elk herd is a few miles away from where Diesel first went missing and in an area where there are no wild donkeys.
So that’s two good reasons to think it really is that particular donkey.
And Max Fennell got a nice letter from PETA.
Comments
14 responses to “Donkey transitions to elk”
Aww, donkey. Donkeys always look so sweet. Even though the only donkey I’ve known in person (a resident of a friend’s horse farm) was kind of a brat and he took an immediate dislike to me. I don’t hold it against the species as a whole.
And he still had his charms, the bitey little brat. Like many bitey cats I’ve known, he was cute enough to get away with it.
They are very cute. I’ve been watching adorable farm videos from Dalscone Farm ever since they adopted Fiona the lonely sheep, and they have some very sweet donkeys. Two live-birth videos in the last couple of weeks or so: two darling foals.
There’s an unusual (and adorable) statue of a donkey near me. Meet Primrose:
(from Atlas Obscura)
Here are pictures of Primrose.
And here’s the real live Primrose. So cute!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2189784/Donkey-walks-time-Bridgnorth-Shropshire-vets-fit-casts-legs.html
Awwwwwwww.
Here’s one of the Dalscone foals (I turned the annoying sound off!)
https://www.tiktok.com/@dalsconefarm/video/7375850571334487329
Donkeys are very good at getting adopted into herds of other species. It’s quite common to put a donkey into a flock of sheep or goats here in Texas. Donkeys can take down coyotes easily and can handle most gators too. Cross species social “transition” is also common in birds. Local example is Floyd 492, an African flamingo that escaped from a zoo in Missouri who now resides in Port Lavaca. He learned how to survive in the wild from a flock of spoonbills who accept him as a member.
Of course, neither example justifies imposing the will of males on non-consenting women
That’s very interesting.
Peta are often arseholes, but on this occasion, don’t they have a point about the hunting trip? I think they do. It seems to me entirely plausible to think that hunting should not happen, and that the onus is on would-be hunters to show that there’s an exception in their case.
Neither do I think that Fennell’s appeal to his ethnicity carries any weight here. Is he not capable of forming opinions of his own? Does the permissibility of hunting really depend on the hunter’s genetic inheritance? I don’t think it does. If there is a case to make, then it stands or falls irrespective of the ancestry of the person making it.
Anyway, yes. Donkeys are ace. I’d like to think that one day I might buy a field big enough to be a home for a donkey and a beehive.
Oh yes. I have no quarrel with Peta’s quarrel with hunting.
I love how perfectly the donkey blends in with the mooses (meese?). Size, movement, colour, the way the whole herd moves together, there really isn’t much to catch the eye from a distance.
Elk ackshly. They’re very similar but moose/meese are significantly larger.
And yes about the blending. It’s really quite touching how thoroughly he’s adopted.
Haha I forgot what I was looking at by the time I posted. That might explain why I thought they weren’t as big as I expected!
Ha! Moose are SO big.