Equus Asinus

Hello, I’m Rubí and this is my Rubí Tuesday blogue. This is the second in a portant series of blogues on Envirionmental Enrichiment – or how to make a more intresting place for a donk to be.  The Donkey Sanctuary advice can be found here on the interwebby thing: 

https://view.pagetiger.com/EnvironmentalEnrichmentforDonkeys/EnvironmentEnrichmentfordonkeys

This week we are looking at the problem of peasants getting carried away with the advice and making badly thinked-through “improviments” which doesn’t much enrichify the envirionment as makes it a scary place.

To be fair to the Peasant, he spent a lot of time thinking up this one, and he did carefully study the Donkey Sanctuary advice on enrichificating the envirionment. When he first bought the red inflatable yacht fender from a ship’s chandlers in La Vila Joiosa, about five years ago, we made it very clear that we found it a very threatening and unwelcome addition to the paddock.

The Peasant, being a man and therefore unable to learn from his mistakes, or indeed listen, kept trying different ways to make the toy more acceptable. This was necessary on the grounds that the toy cost 32 euros therefore must eventually be entertaining. It still isn’t after five years, and when you consider that’s 6.40 euros per year, you’d think by now that the Peasant would have found some envirionmentally responsible way to recycle it or at least make it part of his own interior decor, since it has been clearly rejected as part of our domestic arrangiments.

But no. The Peasant has only made things worse. He spent Monday rigging up a zip wire with a pulley, with the yacht fender attached on a rope, and carefully measuring the wire with a spirit-level to get it just right. “There we are donks! Look! Now you can head-butt it, like rams!”

We looked at it for over an hour.

“I’m thirsty,” said Matilde. “How do we get past it to go and get a drink?”

“You go first,” I said. “You are the biggest. If it does anything dangerous we will distract it.”

We all ran past it and gathered at the drinking fountain for the rest of the afternoon. The Peasant went into a beer episode and said we were all ungrateful. After we brayed for our supper, he arrived with our feed and one of his famous confident pronouncements of “Right, you little blighters!” (which means, “I’m going to outwit you donks.”)

And he emptied our sack of feed underneath the dangerous toy, so we would just have to eat underneath it and overcome our fear.

“Oh brilliant!” said Morris. “That will save us the trouble of tipping the food out of the manger onto the floor to eat it.”

“Oh brilliant, yes!” said Aitana, who doesn’t eat off the floor normally anyway. Silly horse!

“You know what?” said Matilde. “The Peasant spent a whole hour looking for the valve to fit in his bicycle pump to inflate the yacht fender.”

“Yes,” I said. “He likes to do things properly.”