Hello! My name is Clark. I’m part of the team here at GROW HUB. So is my buddy Lewis, who’s around here somewhere. We’re the donkeys you see on GROW HUB T-shirts, bumper stickers, and whatever else the humans can draw, print, or paint on. But we’re not just here to be decorative! We have some very important jobs to do, and some of them are harder than you might think.

 

Our job titles include “pasture management engineers”, “predator spookers” (we’re trying to negotiate that one out of our job description–would YOU take on something with big sharp teeth and claws in the middle of the night wearing nothing but your hooves?), and “non-petrochemical fertilizer production specialists”, but our highest profile jobs are in public relations and something called “enrichment” for visiting groups. I thought enrichment was something humans do to make a donkey’s grain taste sweeter, but apparently it also means humans bringing us carrots. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you humans really need to make up your minds about what your words mean. I want to know whether I’m getting grain or carrots when someone says “enrichment”.

 

Anyway–here I am doing the carrot kind of enrichment. It’s a trade–I get a carrot (Lewis and I also like apples and oranges) and the human gets to pet me. The humans who think they’re in charge keep talking about “training” Lewis and me to allow our adoring public to brush us and lead us around. The silly two-leggers don’t seem to notice that WE have trained THEM to deliver our breakfast promptly every morning, follow US all over our domain, and keep us well supplied with apples and carrots. Really, who’s getting the better end of the deal here?

 

 

 

Oh hey, there’s Lewis! I knew he was around here somewhere. He usually is–we’re “brothers from different mothers”, so where you find one of us the other probably isn’t too far away. Not that we don’t get on each other’s nerves sometimes–hey, you’d kick too if you weren’t getting your share of the apple slices.

To answer the questions humans always seem to ask:

• We were born in May of 2017.
• We’re both male. Our trained humans sometimes refer to us as “the boys”.
• Yes, we are fully grown.
• No, we’re not blood relatives.
• We like carrots, oranges, and apples. We’ve sniffed cucumbers and decided we can do just fine without them. Celery isn’t going to win you much affection either. (We prefer palmetto leaves as dental floss.)
• If you’d like to try the carrot type of enrichment, ask one of the human staff to make the introduction. We prefer to meet new people through people we already know. (And don’t forget the carrots.)
• The strappy things we wear during the day are called halters. We use them to lead our trained humans around.

 

One more thing, then I need to get back to pasture management: The secret to an authentic donkey hee-haw is to INHALE for the “hee” and then EXHALE through the “haw”. That’s the only way to get the resonance you need to let your trained humans know breakfast is late.