Feeding & Nutrition

The donkey is named Eeyore, which the children thought was funny and which the donkey has done nothing to live down. He is a miniature, grey, with a beard that makes him look like he is judging your life choices, and when we got him the rescue said keep him on grass hay and watch the weight, because donkeys are built to live on almost nothing and will thank you by getting fat on less than you think.

I listened for a month. Then a well-meaning friend with horses dropped off a few bales of alfalfa, rich green, sweet-smelling, the good stuff her show ponies loved. I gave Eeyore a flake. He ate it like it was the first real meal of his life. I gave him more. The rescue had said watch the weight. I watched it go up.

Alfalfa is rocket fuel for a donkey. It is high in protein and calcium and energy, formulated for growing foals and working horses, not for a small idle donkey whose main exercise is moving from shade to shade and braying at the postman. Within two months Eeyore was round, his neck had creased into the classic donkey collar of fat, and when the farrier came to trim his feet he looked at the belly and said something unprintable about people who feed lawnmowers premium petrol.

The farrier was right, in his rude way. Donkeys evolved on scrub, dry thorn, the kind of forage that makes a body efficient at doing nothing with very little. Alfalfa is the opposite of scrub. It is a feast, and a donkey's metabolism treats a feast as a thing to store, because its genes remember famine and assume the good times will end, which they do not, because I keep buying hay.

We cut him back to grass hay, soaked to lower the sugar, and leant on the slow feeding. The weight came off over the spring, the crest softened, and the farrier, on his next visit, nodded once and said the donkey might live to meet his grandchildren, which from him was a benediction. Eeyore did not care. He had gone back to judging me, this time from a slightly smaller frame.

The takeaway for anyone feeding a donkey or a small pony: rich hay is a treat, not a staple, and the animal will not tell you to stop because evolution did not equip it to refuse a surplus. You are the brakes. Use them before the farrier has to be rude, and before the laminitis that rich feed invites comes knocking, which is the part nobody mentions until the bill arrives.

Soaking the hay became a daily chore I resented and then accepted, the way you accept any chore that keeps an animal alive and sound. Ten minutes in a trough of water draws out the sugars that would otherwise pack onto the neck, and a donkey on soaked grass hay stays a donkey instead of a barrel. The water runs brown, the barn smells of wet straw, and Eeyore waits by the gate like a patron at a cafe expecting his order, which in a sense he is.

The laminitis scare was real and close. A donkey that founders on rich feed goes lame in front, shifts his weight to the back, and stands with the look of an animal in quiet agony that he will not show until it is bad. We caught the crest hardening early, changed the diet, and never saw the founder, but the farrier's rude sentence lived in my head through the whole winter and kept the alfalfa bales fattening the compost instead of the donkey, which is the use they were always better suited for.

The children ride Eeyore now, the small ones, in a halter and a lead, at a pace that would embarrass a snail, and he carries them with the patience of a creature who has decided the weight is part of the bargain. A miniature donkey built for nothing is, it turns out, built for exactly this, the small procession around the field, the sticky hands in his mane, the utter lack of hurry, and the weight he lost on proper hay has not dimmed his willingness, only his waistline, which the farrier now approves of with a grunt.

A vet visit for his annual check turned into a small lecture when she saw the soaked hay and the absent alfalfa, and then a nod when she pressed his neck and found it soft and sound. Donkeys are stoic about pain, which makes them dangerous to own, because they hide the laminitis until they can barely stand, and the only signal is the slow change in the crest that a careless owner misses. I no longer miss it. I run my hand along Eeyore's neck each week the way the farrier does, and the rude sentence has become a quiet instruction I am finally qualified to follow.