The Donkey Sanctuary - A day in the life of new arrivals

[Music] here in your arrivals you've got a really important job of making sure all the donkeys that come into our care have lots of love and attention and really settle into their new life at the sanctuary obviously at the sanctuary we really want Don P to be in individual homes you can see they love attention love onetoone so ideally we'd like them to stay in homes but it's not always possible it might be through family bereavements or loss of land uh financial problems or sadly still uh rescue and rehoming and and neglect cases that are coming in at the moment means that they they do have to come into us here through their initial week with us we want to make sure that they settle they keep e meeting if they love attention we make sure they get plenty of that that they settle in here some of them aren't used to being handled so we let them settle for a few days first and just get them relaxed in the environment our job as well here is to assess them while they're here we need to find out as much as we can before they come in and then lots of information whilst they're in so that we can decide where's best for them to go on from here and we make sure we inut all of that detail on into the animal management [Music] system so this is Samy he's been here about 8 weeks he will at times kind of Bray and charge at people it seems like it's really defensive um but unless we can identify that trigger then our challenge is to be able to keep the rest of our staff safe and pass on the right information and how we're going to work with him in the future what I'm interested in is if we do more work out in the field like this does it begin to teach him that the behavior he's showing isn't working and I'm really conscious here that I'm between him and Sarah um and if it's a defense issue over her then this is where the behavior could come [Music] from and you can see just how quickly he changed it there behavior is really important for those new donkeys that are arriving at the Donkey Sanctuary because it's our key to understanding who they are the job of new arrivals is to begin to unlock that donkey's potential and their history who are they what do they need how can we meet those needs at the same time of keeping our staff safe it's important that we get to know them and then we share that information from your arrivals to farms and Farms back into wherever those donkeys end up when we got a new donkey with us um then the the nurses will come the first day to have a look at them if we had any concerns then I'll be here straight away just to check them and then if not then I keep coming so routinely to the farm to check any donkey that has arrived weight losses will be something that we will be concerned about many times it can be related to parasites and parasites can also cause problems like colitis like um in this case it could have been we make sure that we have from them a dang sample as well and then the blood samples there to check all of that so this is toas he's just being castrated and is going to Che um the castan site to make sure he's healing well unfortunately many many donkeys that come as stallion um with us and they will need to be castrated because we have a non- breathing policy one of the things that we're more worried about is that whether the stress of coming in is causing them any problems and that's to checking their triglyceride level and make sure they are not getting into a life-threatening disease which is called hyperemia if we were to move them into a farm or into a group without testing or checking them first then we could then bring disase into the hair that would be a serious welfare concern for us and for our [Music] donkeys all donkeys coming into our care into the sanctuary isolation have their teeth checked as a a matter of course it's important that we know the condition of their mouths when they come in so the first sort of thing we're looking for really is symmetry make sure there's no lumps or bumps have a smell does it smell nice uh that's a favorite part of the job finger in the mouth can we sh feel any sharp points and if Sammy wants to give us a nice big smile you can show off his nashes and to examine Samy's mouth we use what's called a houseman's gag I don't know if you can see but he has quite sharp hooks here these little fellows on the end of my thumb and now for the Grim bit so all we're doing here is uh taking the sharp points off of Samy's teeth uh little Amel over and we use a a rotary rft a diamond rft it's very soft uh tissue friendly I can rub it on my arm and does no damage donkeys do seem to need more care than horses due to their stoic nature they don't exhibit symptoms till much later and very often we find by the time they're actually looking ill then it's really difficult to uh put things right regular Dental Care is very important we can get on top of the game and that's it straight forward we spend a lot of time on the donkey feet when they come in because generally they have a lot of issues the donkeys on the Donkey Sanctuary mostly have a lot of concrete to walk on which is very good because it's easy to clean donkey feet grow very very fast so concrete helps wear their feet with a donkey with very long feet comes into the donkey sanctu first thing we do is I'll work with the Vets to take x-rays so we take an x-ray of every foot so we can look at the x-rays and work out how severe it is how serious it is what we need to do and then we will remove all the overgrowth back to a normal foot in one go and that's the way we find over the years is the most appropriate for the donkey so Freddy has very poor confirmation and has had bites of laminitis we're going to put what we call rims on which is like a a plastic slipper that glues onto their foot it's the equivalent of a steel horseshoe but because donkeys have such small feet it's very difficult to attach steel shoes with nails so we're going to use an epoxy resin to to create a to create a falce foot to give her Comfort to make her comfortable by having the donkey feet trimmed regularly and properly a lot of the the issues related to uh foot disease and possible youth Asia can be avoided the minimum stay they have here is six weeks some of them do end up staying here a lot longer depending on kind of their needs their health um and anything else that goes with that we're really lucky to have a really passionate team of people here looking after the donkeys we have a lot of highs a lot of lows so we really have to pull together as a team and give them lots of love and care we have a team that work around the clock so we have an early starting team member right through into the evening we have people here on shift as well so the donkeys really are getting care there is always a waiting list of donkeys that need our help and are wanting to come into the sanctuary so we really have to prioritize those that are really in need and make sure that we get them into our care as soon as we can

Channel: Pangaea TV

Views: 13,843

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Id: A8zLPxgjyzE

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2024