The last few days my heart has weighed heavily in my chest with the gruesome news that 86 elephants were gunned down in Chad. Eighty - six. Just like that. 4 family groups, 33 pregnant females, countless babies, juveniles, young adults and all. Mothers, sisters, daughters, nieces, aunts, cousins. All gone. Elephants are extraordinarily sensitive, feeling and intelligent animals that live in tight family groups. In fact, I suspect they are related to Italians.
Just like that, wiped off the face of the earth. For ivory to feed the insatiable appetite of Asia for trinkets carved from the wondrous white gold? Or that and something even worse? Why gun down babies with no tusks? It's not the first time this has happened. Elsewhere in Africa, entire families have been gunned down from helicopters. Could it be, that just as we now hear rumors of speculators and kingpin poachers stockpiling rhino horns and betting on the extinction of the rhino to drive up the black market price, the same is happening to elephants? Already their extinction, should current conditions remain or deteriorate, is predicted in the next decade. By 2020 even! That is 7 years from now! If nothing changes, babies born today will grow up to think of elephants as relics of the past, ancient history.
So it's a Donkey Day. They are good listeners.
Which means, I need to go spend a few in the company of Tortilla, Taco and Salsa, our little donkey herd. Because they never fail to make me smile and laugh, their big inquisitive brown eyes and long fuzzy ears, their thick eyelashes and funny little noses a photographer's dream.
They have their very own way of looking at things. They are wise, quirky and sensitive, but tough as nails. You look in their eyes, and you know - they are looking right back at you and wondering what's up with you today?
They are bright, naughty, greedy little goobers (as my friend Billy would say), with a great sense of humor, always nosing a pocket and pulling on a sleeve. They want their ears stroked and their foreheads scratched and Tortilla, whose tactile lips remind me of an elephant's incredibly nimble trunk, wants her nose kissed.
Yep, it's a Donkey Day. Gotta go hang with Da Donkeys. So what do you do when you are sad?
Got Donkeys?
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