“GIHC Leasing is looking for one female donkey.”

 

So read a quarter-page advertisement that ran in The BVI Beacon for several weeks during the spring.

Who, I wondered, needed a donkey so badly is this day and age? And why was it taking them so long to find an animal that once was common in the Virgin Islands?

I mentioned the ad to farmer Moviene Fahie, who used to take part in August parades with her late donkey Jack.

Ms. Fahie told me that donkeys are few and far between on Tortola these days. But she had a solution for the advertiser.
“You could get a donkey in Anegada,” she said as she sold produce from her stand on Waterfront Drive. “They grow wild. Anegada have plenty donkey.”

Ms. Fahie got Jack, who died last year, from the sister island in 2004.

“I tame mine,” she said. “Mine wasn’t tame like that. He was a big donkey when I get him, you know.”

How does one tame a donkey?

“I just talk with him, treat him good, feed him good, bathe him, shampoo him,” she said. “And he come tame.”

Resort

The advertiser turned out to be Guana Island Resort, whose staff wasn’t interested in taming a wild donkey.

Nevertheless, by the time I got in touch with managing director Tony Detre a couple of weeks ago, the problem had been solved.

The island, he explained, has been home to two donkeys since the Jarecki family bought it in 1975.

“Jill, who is the female donkey, died a few months ago,” Mr. Detre said. “And since it was always a tradition to have two — and because Jack, the companion, seemed sad and there was a lot of literature about how donkeys require companions — we went hunting for a new Jill for Jack.”

Unlike their ancestors — who were used primarily for lugging people and goods across the territory’s steep terrain — the resort’s donkeys have always had it easy. They live in a spacious enclosure and get treated much like pets, with young guests riding them every now and then.

When word got out about the recent death, Mr. Detre said, “All the guests wrote passionate letters about how we have to replace Jill.”

Long search

But this was easier said than done. After several weeks of advertising, the resort staff came up empty-handed. Eventually, they enlisted the help of Stacy Mather, the director of the Youth Empowerment Project in East End.

“It seems as if donkeys in the BVI are rare commodities,” Mr. Mather said this week. “I was told Anegada has quite a large population, but they’re wild. But we searched Tortola — Paraquita Bay, Sea Cows Bay — and those that did have donkeys were like, ‘No I’m holding onto my donkey.’”

Finally, after calling a veterinarian, he learned that St. John is an “ideal place to find donkeys.” And that’s where the resort purchased Daisy, who was quickly renamed Jill.

The 12-year-old donkey came to Tortola in a specially built stall aboard a barge. After clearing customs in West End, she proceeded to Guana, much to Jack’s delight.

“We were told that when you train the donkeys you have to keep them in separate pens and introduce them to each other,” Mr. Detre said. “But he was very excited, and they walked over to each other right away and rubbed noses.”

Searching

Guana’s struggles didn’t surprise Sea Cows Bay resident Jeffrey Forbes, who owns two male donkeys, which he races in Carrot Bay each August.

He too is looking for a female donkey.

“The donkeys are getting extinct,” he told me this week, before estimating that there are only about 10 left on Tortola. “We got to breed. We got to breed.”

A few weeks ago, Mr. Forbes tracked a wild donkey around Anegada for the better part of a day with the help of some friends and an agriculture officer.

Though they nicked her with a tranquiliser dart, she escaped and led them on an eight-hour chase through the bush before finally eluding them in a salt pond.

“She was just provoking me, teasing me all day,” he laughed, shaking his head.

Though he is seeking a mate for one of his male donkeys, he is worried about the consequences.

“After you breed him once, he’s a whole new animal,” he said, adding, “A stallion donkey can be very wicked.”

For Mr. Forbes, however, the prospect of a Tortola without donkeys is gloomy. He loves to race the animals, and he has fond memories of riding his grandmother’s to Road Town as a child in the 1960s.

Workers

In those days, most houses on Tortola had a donkey, recalled Edmund Maduro, a VI farmer.

“Donkeys are very intelligent animals, as much as we like to use the word ‘ass,’” he said, adding, “I’ve found a donkey to be just as loving as any other animal that you make a connection with.”

Then he told me a story about a donkey that ran a daily delivery route without supervision. At a farm in Bellevue, Mr. Maduro’s great-grandfather would load the animal’s back with several sacks of produce and send him on his way.

“This donkey used to go to the house of every customer and stand up and wait until the customer comes out and takes what is theirs, puts money back in a paper bag so the wind won’t blow it away, and puts it back in the box,” Mr. Maduro recounted.

Eventually, the donkey would make its way home, where Mr. Maduro’s great-grandmother would replace the bag of money with her husband’s lunch and send it back to the farm.

But not all donkeys are so well behaved.

“If you’re riding a donkey and that donkey doesn’t want you to ride it, he will go right up against the tawny trees — acacia — any other tree like that,” Mr. Maduro said. “Any cactus or anything.”

By the mid-1960s donkeys were starting to go out of fashion as a mode of transportation, and when Mr. Maduro started working he bought a motorbike instead.

“By that time we had all stopped buying donkeys,” he said. “When I was a boy every family had at least one donkey. Some of them had a lot of donkeys.”

Tourism

These days, tourism might be the animals’ best chance for survival in the territory.

Just ask Ms. Fahie, the parade participant.

“Jack was a king for the British Virgin Islands,” she said. “All over the world, the tourists would come down just to see me and Jack. And Tortola people them, in fact, they miss Jack a lot.”

After the parade, she added, Jack would get a break.

“He have a year vacation,” Ms. Fahie said. “Better than me because I don’t have vacation.”

Ms. Fahie doesn’t plan to get another donkey — “I’m getting time to retire,” she said — but she hopes someone else will follow in her footsteps.

Anyone who is interested might get an opportunity very soon, thanks to Guana Island’s recent purchase.

“We were told that she was pregnant,” Mr. Detre said of Jill. “So we might help with the donkey shortage.”

 

Disclaimer: Dateline: Paradise is a column and occasionally contains satirical “news” articles that are entirely fictional.

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