Bee Tree Farm

I’m no donkey whisperer, but I’m fairly certain that the events that transpired yesterday evening were not kosher donkey behavior.

Now that the minis have moved in we find ourselves overwhelmed by single donkey ladies. This amounts to nothing special aside from intermittent banshee screams and ragged hee hawing towards a neighboring pasture where a vocal Jack resides. One of our watchful neighbors even reported several Jack pasture-breaks in order for him to pace alongside our fence line – all the single ladies and the Jack screaming at each other in their hiccupy-donkey language through the fence by our main gate.

I didn’t give this much thought until yesterday (tell your children to leave the room) when Chula took it upon herself to mount Brownie who has emerged as the leader of the mini donkey pack. Chula is definitely the leader of all the livestock animals. Now that she has a challenger for the top position (tiny but assertive Brownie) I will attribute Chula’s, er, aggressive behavior to the establishment of her dominance. Or at least I WOULD have had the two not looked like they were sorta enjoying the activity and had been going on like this for awhile now (days?!). In fact we witnessed the display not one but 4 (FOUR) times! It was truly disturbing – mostly because Chula is a standard and Brownie is a mini and the physics were all wrong. Also I panicked and had to wonder – did the Jack somehow successfully make it over the fence recently and now the donkeys were mimicking some recent behavior they’d seen from him? Oh dear.

Good thing we had dinner plans with our good buddy Dwayne last night. Since Dwayne is the official secret-keeper for all things agricultural, Jeremy thought he’d explain our predicament over some crispy catfish and cold beer (yumyumyum) and get a solid answer. Once the story was graphically relayed we expected Dwayne to spout off some long-winded explanation about donkey sexuality being influenced by humidity during a certain phase of the moon in late spring – or something believably scientific. All we got was a deep sigh. Then he removed his hat real fast and scratched the top of head for a second before replacing the cap. “Well, I’ll be damned ya’ll,” he chuckled “never did hear of that sort of nonsense! Maybe momma donkey’s (Chula) in heat and mini donkey’s (Brownie) in heat and heck…” another chuckle “they’s always comin’ in heat in the spring like ‘at and get confused.” He took a swig of beer and changed the subject. Changing the subject indicated that he didn’t really know the answer, and we were both left stunned to silence. Dee-you-wayne not knowing the answer to one of life’s most pressing questions was really unsettling. But watching the single ladies engage in this sort of behavior was much more unsettling, and now that I think of it, I’d like to forget the whole thing.

So let’s just put it out of our heads shall we? How about a lovely group picture from a time before the age of innocence ended: