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[SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>]

Marie, there are a lot of 'donkey folks' in these parts.  I've thought 
about one, but am really a mule person :)  There are quite a few draft 
mules in this neck of the woods, too, as well as a lot of folks with 
draft horses, mostly Belgians and Perchs.

But all the ones I know are working critters. Only a few of the ones I 
know are the burro type, most are what they call around here Mammoths, 
and they seem to be pleasing their owners OK.  It's steep here in places 
and lots of woodworkers are dealing with house-sized rocks to work 
around.  These big donkeys 'fit' better in the woods than the draft 
mules, but are considered to have good temperments for woodswork.  Quite 
a few of them are used for field work, too, and general haul-and-tote 
sorts of chores.  Handsome fellows, don't really have the sort of 
'comic' look of the burro sorts.  Saw just yesterday afternoon the guy 
up the road had his donkeys hitched to and pulling a small building on 
pipes.  See plenty of them in hayfields.  As to plowing, there's not a 
whole lot of heavy plowing here, mostly smallish plots (too hilly, too 
rocky), but certainly I have seen them plowing.

So they can make pretty good workers.  The only thing I've heard about 
them that might be considered a negative is the comment that they "have 
to be started slow", in reference to training young animals.  I've never 
really checked but I think they are referring to the same thing we see 
in mules:  introducing things one at a time, waiting until critter 
understands what you want, not asking him to pull more than he's 
physically ready for, etc....one thing about a mule that everybody finds 
out in a hurry is that he won't do what he doesn't understand or think 
is safe, so the human adjusts to that, and you're both OK:  I'd think 
that sort of thing is what they are referring to.

An aside:  Sometimes I think we don't give these guys enough credit.  
Last year at Common Ground Fair (held by Maine Organic Farmers and 
Gardeners, includes many demos of low-tech farming techniques, among 
plenty of other info) there were several teams of horses, horses singly 
hitched, and teams of mules working up the fields (there is a permanent 
demo farm there with many small plots to keep up) and some wise guy got 
the idea of working a bunch of strange mules together in some strange 
assemblage.  Me muttering to self:  no way.  But hitch them they did, 12 
strong, in widely varying bits of tack, and after one round in the field 
(20 min?) they all quit pitching heads and looking around, flapping 
ears, and just pulled into the task.  These were parts of 4 separate 
teams that didn't know each other until then.  Not a task I'd have taken 
on, especially with all the rest of the strange goings on: thousands of 
people milling about, thresher running, tractors in next field, kids 
darting and yelling (not in field of course, but well within 
sight/hearing), traffic (a lot of strange horses pulling wagons full of 
yakking people, tractors, combines, whatever) on road right beside the 
field where they were working, and a railroad only a couple of thousand 
feet away with engine/4 cars coming/going/shrieking every half hour or 
so.  Plenty of distraction.  But these guys just settled into task about 
right, very nice "crowd o' flesh", as the old timers say here.

Susan Jane, in Maine, where we can finally see open patches of ground 
although there's still plenty of snow about.