It’s World Donkey Day, and there’s a town with a long history that in this day and age has come to wild donkeys.
This is Oatman, officially a census-designated place in western Arizona.
The Mojave people lived in this region for many years.
There are also some Hollywood connections: movie stars Clark Gable and Carol Lombard came to the Oatman Hotel in 1939 for their honeymoon, and several pictures have been filmed there.
But Oatman is mostly known as a gold town; the discovery turned the community for a time into the largest gold producer in the region, and drove its population up from a few people to about 3,000.
Once the gold was gone, so were most of those people.
Oatman became a ghost town… at least in terms of humans.
Some of the miners had brought donkeys with them as beasts of burden, and they didn’t always take the animals with them when they left town.
Over time, this led to a colony of wild donkeys living in and around Oatman.
They are at the center of the latest chapter of the town’s history.
Over the last few decades, a handful of locals have decided to encourage people to visit the remaining buildings from Oatmean’s golden age and to hang out with the donkeys, since there tend to be at least a few dropping by town on any given day.
Some of the establishments in Oatman sell alfalfa pellets that tourists can feed to the donkeys.
Though we should point out, this isn’t a petting zoo, and these are wild animals, so just keep that in mind when you visit.
Here’s a donkey story from 2018.
The CBC reported on a hardship for donkeys at a sanctuary in Kitchener, Ontario (and in other locations, too): bug bites.
The sanctuary staff had been applying bug repellant and taking the usual precautions, but still the donkeys were getting bit.
So a volunteer who was skilled at sewing started making pants for the donkeys.
And did they ever wear those pants well.
How one town became infested with donkeys (ABC 10)
Dapper donkeys: sanctuary fights flies with tailored trousers (CTV News)
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