50 Fun Facts About Donkey

What is an adult male donkey called?

A jack. That is the jack in 'jackass', a word that meant nothing ruder than a male donkey when it was first recorded in the 1720s and only became an insult decades later.

Which animal is the direct ancestor of the domestic donkey?

The African wild ass. Its tame descendants number in the tens of millions, yet the wild animal itself is critically endangered, with a few hundred left at most.

Which king did Apollo give a donkey's ears for preferring a rival's music?

Midas. In Ovid's telling the rival was Pan; the king hid the ears under a turban, but his barber whispered the secret into a hole in the ground, and the reeds that grew there repeated it when the wind blew.

A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and what?

A female horse. Breeders pair the two for hybrid vigour: a mule takes strength, patience and sure-footedness from its father and athletic ability and speed from its mother.

What is the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey called?

A hinny. Swapping which parent is which changes the animal: a hinny usually turns out smaller than its better-known cousin, with a more horse-like head, and it is far less common.

A mule's odd 63 chromosomes almost always leave it what?

Sterile. Its two parents have different chromosome counts, so a mule's cells cannot pair them up evenly to make eggs or sperm, although on rare occasions a female mule has given birth.

On which car-free Greek island do donkeys and mules still haul the luggage, groceries and building supplies?

Hydra. A 1950s decree meant to preserve the island's character bans wheeled vehicles, even bicycles, so goods landed at the harbour go up its steep lanes on animals' backs.

What is the name of the cynical old donkey in George Orwell's Animal Farm?

Benjamin. He can read as well as any pig but refuses to get involved, until he sees what is painted on the van taking his friend Boxer away and raises the alarm too late.

What distinctive marking do most donkeys carry on their backs?

A cross. It forms where a dark stripe running down the spine meets another across the shoulders, primitive markings that the donkey has kept from its wild ancestors.

Which country's donkey herd, about 11 million strong in 1990, had shrunk to roughly 3 million by 2017?

China. Its own herd could no longer supply a booming trade in a traditional remedy made from donkeys, so buyers turned to Africa, where several governments then banned the exports.

Ejiao, the traditional remedy behind a global trade in donkeys, is made by boiling which part of the animal?

The skin. Hides are stewed down into a prized gelatin, and demand grew so strong that families in African villages began waking to find their working donkeys stolen and skinned overnight.

The Donkey Sanctuary, which has taken in thousands of donkeys since 1969, is based near which English seaside town?

Sidmouth. Founder Elisabeth Svendsen had 38 donkeys of her own when another sanctuary owner's will left her 204 more, and what had been a sideline became her full-time work.

The first donkeys in the Americas arrived on whose ships?

Christopher Columbus. They reached Hispaniola in 1495 on his second voyage, and it was probably another century before Juan de Oñate brought donkeys north over the Rio Grande, where they spread with missionaries and miners.

Which name is used in the United States for the feral donkeys living west of the Rocky Mountains?

Burro. It is simply the Spanish word for donkey, and the wild herds descend from pack animals that missionaries and gold and silver prospectors lost or turned loose.

Which country is home to millions of feral donkeys, where they are officially classed as a pest?

Australia. Donkeys arrived in 1866 to work as pack and draught animals, and when motor transport replaced them they were simply turned loose to breed in the outback.

The Poitou donkey, a shaggy giant bred to sire heavy working mules, comes from which country?

France. When tractors ended the demand for big mules after the Second World War the breed all but vanished, and by 1980 fewer than 80 of the shaggy donkeys were left.

Miniature Mediterranean donkeys in the US descend from 1929 imports from which island?

Sardinia. An American stockbroker bought seven of the island's small donkeys sight unseen, and animals that nobody at home thought of as miniature became a pet breed under that name.

The kiang, the largest of the wild asses, lives on which high plateau?

The Tibetan Plateau. Kiangs graze there above 4,000 metres, and they are the one kind of wild ass that is not in trouble: conservationists rate the species of least concern.

Roman soldiers borrowed the name of the onager, a wild ass, for which kind of siege weapon?

A catapult. A Roman officer who served with them wrote that the stone thrower got its name because hunted wild asses were said to kick stones back at their pursuers.

In a Brothers Grimm tale, a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster set out to become musicians in which city?

Bremen. They never get there: on the way they scare a band of robbers out of a house in the woods and like it so much that they stay for good.

In which Mexican border city did tourists pose for decades with zonkeys, donkeys painted with zebra stripes?

Tijuana. The stripes began as a fix for black-and-white photography, in which pale donkeys barely showed up, and they lasted long enough to become an emblem of the city.

Kungas, prized hybrids of donkeys and wild asses, pulled the war wagons of which ancient civilisation before horses arrived?

Mesopotamia. DNA from 4,500-year-old skeletons showed in 2022 that breeders mated female donkeys with captured male Syrian wild asses, a wild animal that has itself since gone extinct.

Which Founding Father is called the "father of the American mule" for pioneering mule breeding in the United States?

George Washington. In 1785 Spain's Charles III sent him a prized stud donkey, which he named Royal Gift, and he hired the animal out so that other farmers could breed mules too.

The famous twenty-mule teams of the 1880s hauled wagons of borax out of which California valley?

Death Valley. Each 'twenty-mule team' was really eighteen mules and two horses, and it needed ten days to drag its wagons the 165 miles to the nearest railhead.

In American politics, the donkey is the unofficial mascot of whom?

The Democrats. Opponents mocked the party's 1828 presidential candidate as a donkey, and he took up the insult and put the animal on his posters; cartoonist Thomas Nast later popularised it as the party's symbol.

In the Book of Numbers, whose donkey sees an angel blocking the road and speaks to its master?

Balaam. The king of Moab had hired him to curse the Israelites, but after the donkey's rebuke he could only bless them, three times over, to the king's fury.

Which biblical judge killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey?

Samson. The place was named Jawbone Hill after the fight, and the victor then nearly died of thirst there until water sprang out of a hollow in the ground.

Christians remember Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem on which day of the church year?

Palm Sunday. The name comes from the branches the crowd waved and laid in his path, and Matthew says the humble mount was chosen to fulfil a prophecy of a king arriving on a donkey.

Who voices Donkey in the Shrek films?

Eddie Murphy. His motor-mouthed sidekick ends up married to the fire-breathing Dragon who once guarded the princess, and the couple's flying children are known as Dronkeys.

The real Christopher Robin's stuffed Eeyore now lives in which city's public library?

New York. The stuffed animals left England in 1947 to tour America with A. A. Milne's US publisher, which kept them for forty years and gave them to the library in 1987.

What is the favourite food of Eeyore, the gloomy donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh?

Thistles. On the expedition to the North Pole his lunch turns out to be the one Pooh is sitting on, and he grumbles that being sat on takes all the life out of them.

Which weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream has his head turned into a donkey's by Puck?

Nick Bottom. The bewitched fairy queen dotes on him, ears and all, and when the spell lifts he decides it was a vision and plans a ballad about it called 'Bottom's Dream'.

In Carlo Collodi's original novel, Pinocchio turns into a donkey after fleeing to what place?

The Land of Toys. After five months of play and no school he wakes up with a donkey's ears, and the wagon driver who lured him there sells him to a circus.

Who wrote The Golden Ass, the only Latin novel from ancient Rome to survive complete?

Apuleius. His hero Lucius meddles with a witch's magic hoping to turn into a bird, becomes a donkey instead, and gets his own shape back only when the goddess Isis takes pity on him.

Which Nobel laureate wrote Platero y yo (1914), about a writer and his silvery donkey?

Juan Ramón Jiménez. The book grew out of years spent back in Moguer, his Andalusian birthplace, yet the Nobel reached him in 1956 in Puerto Rico, where the Civil War had left him an exile.

Buridan's ass is a philosophical paradox in which a donkey starves because it cannot choose between what?

Two identical piles of hay. The example appears nowhere in Jean Buridan's own writings: later critics seem to have invented the starving donkey to mock his account of free choice.

Which stretcher bearer became an Anzac legend for carrying wounded soldiers on a donkey at Gallipoli?

John Simpson Kirkpatrick. The Anzacs' folk hero was an Englishman from South Shields who had jumped ship in New South Wales five years earlier, and he was shot dead less than four weeks after landing.

Brighty of the Grand Canyon, a 1953 children's novel about a real donkey, was written by which author?

Marguerite Henry. Her hero was a real animal that lived in the canyon until 1922, and his bronze statue came through the 2025 wildfire that destroyed its North Rim lodge, minus an ear and two legs.

Who recorded the 1960 novelty hit "Dominick the Donkey"?

Lou Monte. His song about a donkey who helps Santa over Italy's hills reached number three in Britain at Christmas 2011, half a century on, after a radio breakfast show adopted it.

The 1977 TV special Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey is based on a song by which singing cowboy?

Gene Autry. He co-wrote the song in 1975, long after his hit recording of Rudolph, and it has the same twist: the ears Nestor is mocked for end up sheltering Mary on the road to Bethlehem.

The Nintendo character Donkey Kong, despite the name, is what kind of animal?

A gorilla. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto chose 'donkey' to suggest stubbornness, and the 1981 game was built to salvage thousands of unsold cabinets of a flop called Radar Scope.

Which Greek physician of the fifth century BC prescribed donkey milk for fevers, wounds and liver trouble?

Hippocrates. Donkey milk is close in make-up to human breast milk, which is why it is still given today to children who cannot tolerate cow's milk.

Which Roman empress, a wife of Nero, was said to keep donkeys so she could bathe in their milk?

Poppaea Sabina. Pliny says troops of she-asses travelled with her wherever she went, because their milk was believed to smooth away wrinkles and keep the complexion pale.

In the United States, guard donkeys are commonly put out to pasture to protect which livestock?

Sheep. A donkey that has bonded with a flock treats it as its own herd, and it will bray at, chase and kick any dog or coyote that comes too close.

Ten donkeys were found buried like nobles beside an early king's burial complex in which ancient civilisation?

Egypt. The 5,000-year-old skeletons lay where excavators expected courtiers, and their worn joints showed that these honoured animals had spent their lives hauling heavy loads.

Which author hiked across the Cévennes with a stubborn donkey called Modestine and wrote a travel classic about it?

Robert Louis Stevenson. He bought her for 65 francs and a glass of brandy to carry his sleeping sack, cursed her pace for twelve days, and then admits he wept when he sold her.

Experts say the donkey's reputation for stubbornness really reflects a strong sense of what?

Self-preservation. A donkey that senses danger stops to weigh it up and is very hard to force or frighten onward, which people have long misread as plain obstinacy.

Francis Grose's 1785 slang dictionary nicknamed the donkey "the King of Spain's" what?

Trumpeter. The joke is the bray, and the same entry guessed that 'donkey', then a brand-new slang word, came from the animal's Spanish or don-like gravity.

Which old British slang word for a donkey is also the name of a tiny open-top utility car based on the Mini?

Moke. The Mini Moke was offered to the British Army as a vehicle light enough to drop by parachute, was turned down for sitting too low to the ground, and became a 1960s fun car instead.

Besides catching distant sounds, a desert donkey's outsized ears are thought to help it do what?

Keep cool. Blood passing through the big ears is thought to shed heat, and the same ears may help donkeys spread far apart in the desert keep track of one another's brays.