Beano is such an interesting donkey. He can make some very off-putting faces... yet I've never felt worried or unsafe in his presence. Okay, maybe in the initial couple of days I did check over my shoulder as I was walking away for him across the field. But that was more because of the label of “aggressive” that had been given to him, (reinforced by a lot of head snaking !) and my very human reaction to that - rather than what my felt sense was at the time. Something to remember when dealing with “aggression” is that it is often associated with fear.
He is such an interesting case, I thought you might like to see some videos and practice your own observation skills ! In this first video you see what he was like in the first weeks. (After the 3 days he spent parked in one spot trembling and just looking at everything like his mind had been blown... between the other donkeys, the trotting stables and the ducks... his mind was blown.)
To help Beano with his reeducation, we rapidly integrated him with his new partner Hector. In this following clip, you've got Beano interacting with Hector and they're working it out together, they don't know each other very well at this point. Beano obviously has some language issues (!) and Hector's like, “What are you swearing at me for? Well, I'll swear back at you then so you see how it feels.” (This is a tongue in cheek interpretation, feel free to leave your observations in the comments !)
You have to know the rudiments of a language to avoid frustration and miscommunication - this takes time to learn for all of us.What we notice is that they very effectively and calmly deal with the situation, they maintain their personal space, and then they walk away. This bodes well for their future relationship. We were pretty encouraged by the balance between them at this point.
I thought I'd share with you one of the interactions I had with Beano in the early days. He was more confident with his new friend Hector with him, he comes right up to me and Hector in the field. I just offer him the back of my hand. Then he sort of switches between licking it, and then as Hector approaches there's a little bite in there, and his ears sometimes go back—he gets overstimulated by the situation of dealing with me and Hector. After a while he moves away from us to have more personal space – where he feels safer. Then he comes back ! At this point he is not approachable, so I had to simply accept what was possible for him on the day, it was already great that he felt able to approach. Notice that I don’t react to his facial expressions – which don’t come across as very friendly !
It's like he is juggling lots of emotions (and sensorial input !) and doesn't have the language in order to communicate correctly. I see this as a little bit like with some humans, that when overstimulated, they say the wrong thing and they can't necessarily say what they mean. They don't have the words for it or their emotions override everything. Some people just don't have filters and say the first thing on the mind even if they shouldn’t – this is much less of a problem in the animal world !
It would be very easy to get offended in these situations and to take the inappropriate communication personally. But that doesn’t help the situation – and it’s not personal !
What we're trying to practice here is the concept of neutrality. This is not bad behavior. This is only communication. When you start thinking about it
like that, it kind of changes the game. If we stay very neutral and we don't
react to his reactivity - or what might be considered undesirable behavior -
we allow him to start to explore how to interact with humans in a different
way.
(Of course if I had really felt that I might be unsafe, I would
have chosen an option such as working in protected contact with a fence
between us.)
With donkeys (and horses) sometimes they can get very confused because humans behave inconsistently, particularly if it is around food. (People carrying a bag of carrots in one hand and a big stick in the other, is something we sadly see too often with donkeys !) Food treats can be overstimulating – they like them ! But an overstimulated donkey can be quite intimidating, and then the human doesn’t feel safe.
Maybe the human reacts by saying “no” a lot, in increasing volume, or starts gesturing in an attempt to calm things down. I’m hope you can understand that this is not going to be helpful... and more often than not stimulates the donkey even more by adding candles. A better approach, if you want to give treats such as carrots which are high value, would be to put them on their hay or on the ground around their shelter for them to discover, and just use scratches as a reward. Low value food rewards such as hay cobs can be helpful if you are doing training because they don't excite them so much - sometimes even hay is a better option. When Beano first arrived the only thing he would eat was hay, so I used that a lot to start with.
So Beano is learning two languages at the moment. He's learning to speak donkey, but he's also learning to speak human. And obviously, those conversations between human and donkey go better when the human understands more of the donkey language…
At the end of the this last video, you see Hector using his communication skills. And this is something that most people wouldn't really notice but look how he moves his head away from me. This is a calming signal, he's indicating that he'd really rather I didn't scratch his neck or his head. He’s previously explained to me: “If you're going to touch me, he says, I'd rather have wither scratches”. He's not big on the the touchy feelies, I'm slow to learn - and poor chap, I was probably more concentrated on what Beano was saying at the time.
We've all got our personal preferences, and it's all about how we communicate, can we communicate effectively enough to get along together?
Hector and Beano continue to forge their friendship at Heehaws, a donkey rescue in the Dordogne region of France. They will be up for adoption when the time is right for them, both of them are working on being more confident around humans.
Here is a more recent interaction. We haven't see any head snaking in weeks... 💕
