Donkeys Mules & Asses

By Peter Young

An illustrated international cultural history of the animals, covering their uses by man, presence in languages and idioms, myths and fables, war, history, books, entertainment and their welfare. It follows the author's, cultural histories of Tortoise, Swan and Oak.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Young
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301758418

Peter Young

Peter Young read history and archaeology at Cambridge. Since 1976 he has been an independent scholar, earning his living by his pen/typewriter/word processor/PC and what's between his ears. Bread and butter income initially came from writing business histories and studies.Since 2000 his work has concentrated on international cultural histories, in particularTORTOISE (2003) inspired by and dedicated to his tortoise Timmy for her 50 years in the family, achieved in Millennium Year. The book is now in five languages besides English.SWAN (2008), elegant afloat and airborne, is also in German.OAK (2013), his first excursion into a botanical cultural history and his first ebook.

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Donkeys, Mules and Asses

A cultural history of the donkey

by Peter Young

Published by Peter Young Associates at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Peter Young

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Tamed

Chapter 2 - Serving

Chapter 3 - Perceptions

Chapter 4 - Myths and Fables

Chapter 5 - At War

Chapter 6 - In History

Chapter 7 - In Books

Chapter 8 - Entertainers

Chapter 9 - Welfare

Chapter 10 - References

Chapter 11 - Illustrations

Chapter 12 - Acknowledgements

Chapter 13 - About the Author

Chapter 1 - Tamed

This picture was taken at a goat and cattle station in Queensland, Australia. A

Which animals are superior and of the most use to man? The question is debated by the animals themselves in the mid-fourteenth century vernacular Greek poem An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. In what is a Late Byzantine precursor to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), at a convention of animals each creature stakes its claim while decrying its rivals. For example, the donkey dismisses the ox:

The donkey, having heard the ox’s boast

Of how his dick is long and fiery hot,

Let fly a little fart and brayed a bit.

Then, heralded by blasts of breaking wind,

In he ran. As he stood on centre stage,

He pricked his ears up and addressed the ox:

‘You lie, long-winded fool, and boast too much:

it’s me that has a dick thick as a cudgel,

long, robust, plump, and headed with a nostril!

Not only is it bigger than your own,

But it surpasses any animal’s.

And when it’s stirred by lust and kindled somewhat,

Its head becomes just like a Western saucer!’¹

Coarse humour of natural body functions appealed to the mediaeval mind. The ox is succeeded by the horse, which declaims how the donkey is exploited:

Tell me, you bloody-spited Dick-O-Matic,

tell me how people burden you, poor fool!

Tell me how people flog away at you!

They load you up with flour and grain and barley,

pulses and fava beans and all the like,

as well as wine and vinegar and oil;

you also carry water, straw and sticks,

greens, brushwood, trunks and all things of the sort,

stones, gravel, bricks and dirt – and, in a word,

whatever people use in any work,

and any kind of edible or food,

it’s on your back that they will pile it up.

They flog you, club you, clobber you to death;

They prod your arse with irons and with sticks. ²

Furthermore, the horse relates for how despoiling a vineyard the donkey is severely punished, even mutilated, becoming a laughing stock for all the animals. Injury is added to insult when, forced to wear a badly made pack saddle, its back is skinned, attracting crows.³

To show what a stupid creature the donkey is the horse relates a story that probably had its origin in a Cretan folk tale. A donkey was elected by its fellows to present a petition to the king calling for an end to extra loads. Successful, the donkey carried the royal decree between its teeth. Overjoyed at returning with the good news, it was so excited in making the announcement that it swallowed the decree, which failed to emerge when it urinated. Ever since donkeys have stooped and sniffed in the hope of finding it.⁴ In Aesop’s version of the fable Zeus told the donkeys they would only get rid of their misfortune when they made a river by urinating.⁵

In the animal kingdom it is the herbivores that emerge as the victors over the carnivores, as in two slightly later Greek verse fables. The Vita of the Esteemed Donkey pits the learned classes, represented by the fox, against the simple donkey. It is the donkey that wins. A variant of this is the Fair Tale of the Donkey the Wolf and the Fox, in which a fox and a wolf conspire to eat the donkey through a mock confession of sins, but they are outwitted.⁶

Young donkeys are appealing animals, naturally attracting attention. This one has been tethered after being rounded up on a high alp in Kyrgyzstan. During the summer months families of herders camp in yurts to gather donkeys that will later be harnessed. B

Taming wild animals was a significant step in the ascent of man. As a hunter-gatherer in the Old and Middle Stone Ages, sometimes helped by the sympathetic magic of cave paintings, small groups of folk depended upon luck and skill for survival. Their way of life was more nomadic than settled. They had to go where fruits, berries, nuts, edible roots and other vegetable matter were to be found. Insects, grubs and snails, probably gathered by women and children, also provided some nourishment.

The bonus was flesh and man was the hunter. He used traps, missiles and primitive flint weapons to capture animals, butchering them where they lay. A second best was scavenging the prey of other animals, either for the flesh or to smash the bare bones and extract the marrow, which few animals were able to do. Fish were caught.

Nature offered variety and uncertainty. When it was bountiful success was celebrated in feasting because folk did not know when and where their next good meal was coming. Diet was unpredictable and unbalanced. Folk were at the mercy of nature. They survived from day to day and season to season. On a large scale climate fluctuated, alternating in a series of glacial and warmer interglacial periods. Global weather could produce intense local effects, for instance an ice age. A subsequent thaw produced great changes in water levels, causing floods and folk to flee to the security of higher ground. Life was indeed nasty, brutish and short.

In the New Stone Age man began to become the master of his environment. Equipped with sharper flint and stone tools, he could clear faster and more easily land for animal husbandry and cultivation. A farmer, he tamed and raised livestock such as cattle and pigs, and later crops, mainly cereals. The introduction of agriculture was a paradigm shift. Animals were stepping-stones to human achievements. The step-change brought greater security in the essentials of life: food, clothing and shelter. Better transport led to more trade. In a more predictable environment man grew more confident of making his way in the world.

Exercising dominion over a few members of the animal kingdom was a process of trial and error. Which animals would best serve man’s needs? Aristotle distinguished among tame animals e.g. the donkey, wild animals such as the panther and the wolf, and those like the elephant that can be readily tamed.⁷ Docility did not necessarily equate to utility. Man developed a symbiotic relationship with particular animals. Probably he gave priority to livestock as a source of food rather than to animals for transport. Some, like oxen, served both purposes. Horses and donkeys were the last of the common livestock animals to be domesticated and they have been the least affected by human manipulation and artificial selection.⁸

How best to train various wild animals? It was necessary to learn something of their behaviour, their good and bad habits. Their diet did not have to be the same as in the wild. At the same time poisonous plants and seeds had to be avoided. How should they be treated when sick? Above all was the question of man’s relationship with animals. Was it simply one of master and slave? Were creatures just to serve man’s needs, to be abandoned or killed when no longer useful?

The progenitor of the domestic donkey was the wild ass from Saharan Africa and probably also Arabia. It was first bred in captivity in Egypt and Western Asia early in the third millennium BCE (Before the Common Era).⁹ Human burials associated with the remains of donkeys and pieces of harness have been excavated from Sumerian sites in Mesopotamia dating from 2500 BCE.¹⁰ An even earlier date of soon after 3500 BCE has been suggested for the use of ass-drawn wheeled vehicles in the area. In cultural diffusion donkeys are typical of species that disperse fairly rapidly and widely through their association with humans. Having a desert origin, the spread of the donkey later became almost coterminous with the conquests of Islam. In the century after the death of Mohammed (632) Arab armies advanced through much of the Middle East and North Africa, creating a considerable degree of cultural unity.

In the tenth century The Island of Animals, a fable written in Basra in what is now southern Iraq, expressed in popular form the teachings of Islam on man’s responsibilities towards dumb animals. The Koran has five chapters named after animals and mentions many others. Essentially the teachings of the Prophet were that animals have rights and man has responsibilities, on which he will be answerable at his death and the quality of his afterlife will depend.

In the fable the spokesman for the farm animals was the donkey/horse hybrid, the mule:

First of all, man should know and recognise that all animals,

like man himself, are the work of the wise Creator,

who made them as they are for good reasons.

It is clear, though,

that men do not have the sense to see God’s great wisdom in creating

His various creatures as He has…

The Almighty, man should know, has fashioned all His creatures, large and small,

in accordance with their particular needs,

and it is not right for any one of His animals, man included,

to claim that one animal is more beautifully formed than another.¹¹

The teachings influenced mediaeval Jewish travellers in the Arab world, who were given instructions on their general behaviour so that they would not offend Muslim manners and customs. On a journey made in 1481 from Volterra, Italy, Rabbi Meshullam Ben R. Menahem while in Egypt commented:

It is also their custom to give no fodder to donkeys and nothing to drink,

only all the caravan together,

for it is by their law a great sin that the other horses

or small donkeys should see one of them eat,

because that would hurt those that are not eating, and that is cruelty to animals.

There was an element of self-interest:

Therefore, every man must be careful not to transgress their customs lest,

God forbid, they find out that he is a Jew or a Frank,

and unlucky is he that falls into this trap.¹²

This echoed the traditional reprimand of the Prophet to a man sharpening his blade as the animal watched:

‘Do you wish to slaughter the animal twice:

once by sharpening your blade in front of it and another time by cutting its throat?’¹³

The rabbi also noticed what was probably an indirect kindness to the animals. In Cairo, ‘the saddles of the donkeys are worth very much’¹⁴; in Jerusalem, ‘They also have asses whose saddle is worth a lot of money, for they place upon it precious stones and gold threads’.¹⁵

Donkeys are members of the horse family, equidae. There are three basic species: the African wild ass; the Asiatic wild ass; and the kiang or kyang from Tibet/Northern India. In the early 1940s the latter was observed in Tibet by the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer:

a sort of wild ass, which lives in

Central Asia and enchants travellers by the grace of its movements.

The animal is about the size of a mule.

It often shows curiosity and comes up to look at passers-by

– and then turns and trots off in the most elegant manner.

The kyang feeds on grass and is left in peace by the inhabitants.

Its only enemy is the wolf.

Since I first saw them these untamed beautiful beasts have seemed

a symbol of freedom.¹⁶

Having been the origin of the domestic donkey, the African wild ass is today critically endangered as a result of hunting and warfare. Its survival is regarded as vulnerable. Wild asses still exist in continents other than Africa, mainly in large areas such as Australia and the USA, where since 1971 they are protected under the Wild Free-Roaming and Burro Act. (A burro is the Portuguese and Spanish word for ass and in Mexican Spanish a burrito is a small donkey, also a tortilla filled with meat, beans, chilli and other ingredients.) The Bureau of Land Management captures a number of wild asses each year and puts them