Week 2 with BLM Donkeys: Less Wild, More Mild

We're starting to get somewhere.

Jun 19, 2025

I’m less than two weeks in with the new adoptees straight outta the Bureau of Land Management’s wild herds, and things are slowly coming around. In training scenarios, many professionals talk about going slow to go fast, and though I’m not a professional, it’s something I take to heart with all my animals.

Today, I’m breaking down my health assessment of the fellas, where we’re at, and where we’re headed. You can read their origin story here, and I’ll be writing a more formal piece about these boys and the adoption process for the Summer Issue of The Westrn’s newsprint magazine — which you can preorder here for $10.

Now, on to donkmanship.

Names!

I’ve been calling my donk Kevin Franklin, after my family’s favorite Sinbad character in the cult classic 90’s movie Houseguest. (Why? Kev was born and spent most of his life in Sinbad, Utah!) If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend. Phil Hartman and Sinbad play off each other hilariously, in a hijinks film where Kevin Franklin gets in all sorts of trouble. Welcome to the family, ol’ Kev.

The Shagamuffin (left) and Kevin Franklin (right)

Elise still needs to name her dude, but I’ve been calling him the Shagamuffin. We’ll see what she goes with. He’s extremely cute, and the friendlier of the two at the moment. But Kev is comin’ around.

No Emergency Care Needed: Infections, Coat, Hooves

Some of the donkeys in the sale had obvious things that needed to be treated on what I’d call a close-to-emergency basis. Thankfully, many of them got adopted by people ready to care for them.

A BLM vet told me that many of the donks had flystrike on their legs — which looked wildly painful and is so gross. I don’t recommend reading about it. Some of it looked like scratches or mud fever to me, which would vibe with the time the donkeys had spent in Kansas mud prior to coming to Montana. These boys do have little bits of scabbing, but nothing compared to some others in the group, and they are healing nicely in their big dry run rather than — ick — oozing.

Their coats are both matted to some degree, though the nutrition I’ve been giving is helping shine them up and shed them out. Mules and donkeys shed later in the summer than horses, and I’m hoping that by the time they’re really starting to shed, I’ll be grooming them and getting their coat problems under control. That said, the mats don’t look painful, just annoying, and likely hot as the days are growing warmer.

Thankfully, DOGE allowed the BLM caretakers time to trim their hooves at some point in the past few months. Hoof care can become an emergency situation real quick if left untreated, but by the time they’ll need their hooves done again, I will have them both in hand and hopefully trained for my farrier. Thankfully, he is a very kind horseman happy to take his time with green — or less trained — animals. If they’re not ready, we have options to contain them and provide safe hoof care.

Deworming is not as Simple as Ivermectin

I do need to pick up a pack of edible dewormer to run another round through these boys, as they’ve only been given Ivermectin through the BLM. Though I personally don’t recommend Ivermectin for COVID treatment, it is great for killing a lot of worms, but a variety of other dewormers are needed to prevent tolerance in parasites as well as kill multiple varieties of worms.

Ugh. Parasites. Hate hate double hate. Deworming is a funny dance these days, with certain parasites growing tolerant because of over-deworming, and many horseman not doing it all. My mule Mojo likely has intestinal scarring from lack of deworming — which just means he farts a lot — but after an aggressive cycle over the past year, he is looking phenomenal. We’ll get these boys on the same track.

For now, I’ll buy dewormer available as a feed supplement instead of attempting to deworm them with a tube. It’s a great option for horses who are unhandled.

Colorado State provides exceptional guidelines on how to best accomplish a deworming schedule, and as an alum, I have to shout it out here.

Blooming Friendships, Accepted Frenemies

Donkeys are notoriously great at guarding livestock. We can also interpret this as the following — they are intolerant of a lot of small predatory species.

Read: they are wired to dislike dogs and cats. I have both.

When the boys first got here, they would stalk the dogs along the fence line with their big ears far forward, looking extremely friendly. Then, at the last second, they’d pin their ears back and stomp with both front feet as hard as they could. They almost got my poor feral cat Rickety Cricket when I couldn’t get there first — and honestly, I think they could have — but it’s sort of like a bluff charge from a grizz. Their hearts aren’t totally in it.

Yesterday, my spaniel Bob was in their pen, happily munching on donkey shit, and they cared not at all. I caught Butch the Border Collie in their pen once as well. I did have some worries about them hurting the small animals, but I think we’ve established that all the small animals here are harmless. They’re beginning to fit in.

Human Contact

Donkeys have less of an established flight mechanism with horses. They tend to be stand-their-ground sort of critters. This accounts for the dog stomping. It also means that you have to approach training them differently.

With horses, we tend to use their flight mechanism to work with them as that’s their more comfortable reflex. Flight isn’t super heightened. With donkeys, flight is not the norm. They’d rather figure something out than waste valuable energy running from it. From what I’ve read on donkeys, using their flight mechanism can actually make them more fearful, not less.

But, I’ve only worked with domesticated horses, mules, and, well, one donkey who is a perfect angel, so I’ve been looking for resources. A friend recommended trainer Juliana Ladenburg, of Hope, The Wild Burro Place. She’s tamed and trimmed many wild donks over the years, hopping into emergency care situations and getting shit done. It’s inspiring. I’m scheduling a tele-lesson with her to get a better idea of how to build a program for the donks.

I’ve also been experimenting and exposing them to normal life at my little farm. I clean out their pen, feed them, and expose them to little things where I can. I do what’s called approach/retreat work with them daily, and they’re both getting so much more comfortable with having people around. They sniffed my nephew, and he was so so excited about it — telling me he was the first to touch them. We’ll give it to him. They seem to like kids, which is a very good thing.

They both want to be friends, and they’re trying so hard. I’m looking forward to hearing from a pro on how to get them going, but I’m taking my nephew to Washington state this weekend for summer camp, so they’re going to have a bit of a vacation themselves.

Because of this trip, Week 3 might come later next week, but don’t worry — plenty to talk about.

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Lmk down below!