donkey // Current

Mother and Daughter Donkeys in Lafayette, Georgia

On the way to pick up my grandson Chance, I see these two beautiful donkeys. Mother... more

Rickharmon25
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6 days ago
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Barefoot Tales From the Road pt. 1 (Centennial)

While in Centennial we try and put together a donkey cart to make it over the Snowie... more

wyoroadrunner
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17 days ago
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Barefoot Tales From the Road pt. 2 (Snowies)

Getting up and over the Snowy mountains while having some fun on the side and trying... more

wyoroadrunner
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17 days ago
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“Biblioburro” - a donkey library - visits Colombian children

In rural Colombia, a man is bringing knowledge to hundreds of farm children on the... more

rebelution07
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2 months ago
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Video of Sam Roberts and Matt Mays Rock Roll Surf Showdown

http://surfdonkey.ca Click us a rating! With Sam Roberts in town to play at the... more

SurfDonkey
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3 months ago
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Sam Roberts and Matt Mays Rock Roll Surf Showdown Video

http://surfdonkey.ca Click us a rating! With Sam Roberts in town to play at the... more

SurfDonkey
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3 months ago
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Do You Know What The F**k This Is ????

Is it a Zebra or a Donkey ? Well I didn't know either .... I thought it was a... more

bigredkev
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3 months ago
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The Eight Most Cruel and Controversial World Delicacies

While looking at these bloody delicacies, do you still feel hungry?

CHANLEEPENG
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4 months ago
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Donkey painted to look like zebra

GAZA—Something didn't quite look right about the zebra, but it was hard to say exactly what. Of the several ramshackle zoos in Gaza, Marah, located not far from the Bureij refugee camp, is by far the cheeriest: The animals are lively, the enclosures clean, and children gather around the cage of a resting lion.

Then again, the competition is hardly stiff: The zoo in Rafah features dead animals left to rot in their cages; another animal park, situated in a densely populated neighborhood in Bureij, recently shut down amid financial difficulties (and after neighbors complained of the smell). A third, also in Bureij, is so short of funds that a fox is kept in a grocery cart with a board over the top.

Yet Marah, with its broken-down bumper cars and a pit filled with sadly deflated balls, had its own not-quite-right feel—particularly the zebra. Standing near the back of its cage, facing away from the spectators, the animal kept its head tucked down.

"It's really a painted donkey," admitted Mahmud Berghat, the director of Marah, when asked about the creature. Making a fake zebra isn't easy—henna didn't work and wood paint was deemed inhumane, so they finally settled on human hair dye. "We cut its hair short and then painted the stripes," Berghat explained behind the closed door of his office.

It did the trick—if not for zoologists, then at least for legions of Gaza schoolchildren who have never seen a real zebra. When I asked him whether anyone had ever caught the ruse, the director admitted that two sharp university students had IDed the counterfeit creature. "But don't tell anyone," he said. "The children love him."

The idea of a zoo creating a fake zebra sounds preposterous, but this is Gaza, which, after two years of an economic blockade, is renowned for recycling, repurposing, and smuggling just about anything that can't be imported legally. The zoo, in a way, represents all three of these coping mechanisms: a couple of house cats stand in for wild cats; the lion was drugged and smuggled through a tunnel from Egypt; and the zebra, as Berghat joked, was "locally made."

Zoos in war zones produce an unending cascade of heart-string-tugging stories. Kabul, Afghanistan, had Marjan, the one-eyed lion, who famously survived the Soviet invasion and Taliban rule only to die in his sleep in 2002. The Baghdad zoo, once the largest in the region, was looted during the 2003 invasion.GAZA—Something didn't quite look right about the zebra, but it was hard to say... more