The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Hee Haw at Tripledale Farm
‘Agritainment’ owners of Tripledale Farm to offer mammoth donkey
GUILFORD >> Meet Sage and Sandy, the mammoth donkeys from Oklahoma who have made their home at Guilford’s Tripledale Farm since 2008.
Each is as fiercely loyal as a Rottweiler but with the good-natured affection of a puppy, albeit a 900-pound one, that you can ride. Each has the gentle-eyed mellowness of a Deadhead but without the psychedelics. Each is low-maintenance, doesn’t need to be exercised much, and will eat anything, including discarded Christmas trees.
Each is also an instrument in the mission of Kim Brockett and Mike Cappelli to debunk the myth of donkeys as stubborn, slow-witted, and generally at the bottom of the ladder of human regard.
“Donkeys are the most misunderstood animal worldwide,” said Brockett, clad in a T-shirt that read KEEP CALM AND DONKEY ON, on a recent afternoon at Tripledale Farm, the training ground for the donkey rides, petting zoos, Palm Sunday services, and Christmas pageants that she and Cappelli offer up and down the Shoreline and around the state.
“Anyone who says a donkey is stubborn has been outsmarted by a donkey.”
Sage, 14, and Sandy, 19, are also blue bloods. According to Brockett, they’re directly descended from a breed started by George Washington, who crossed them with horses to create strong work mules. Then came farm machinery. The need for mules dwindled, as did the need for mammoth donkeys.
Now, roughly 230 years later, Sage and Sandy, along with their corral-mates Sharpy and Kelby, are on the watchlist for extinction, as “four of only 2,500 mammoth donkeys left in the world,” said Brockett, as Cappelli finished feeding their seven donkeys, two llamas, four goats, and sheep in the mild hayscented air.
Cappelli does the feeding each afternoon at 5 when he gets home from his job as office manager at Commercial Air Services in North Branford. He grew up in East Haven, “a city person,” he said, and being mechanically inclined, he’s known as the pit crew of the operation. Brockett fills their feeders with hay at 4:45 a.m. every morning before she heads off to Farm Credit East in Enfield where she works as an accountant.
Back in 2008, Brockett, who grew up on a 11th generation dairy farm in North Haven, knew little about the so-called beasts of burden. “We were looking to get horses and riding animals,” she said. “My son was still fairly young so I picked up a book at the library about disappearing breeds of domesticated animals and there were the mammoth donkeys.”
She was intrigued. Soon she and her son found themselves on a ranch in Oklahoma, checking out the mammoth donkeys, and soon after that, they were back at Tripledale Farm with Sage and Sandy.
The first couple weeks were rough. “We learned pretty quick we weren’t going to get very far until they got to know us and trust us,” Brockett said.
The reason, said Cappelli: “In the equine world, donkeys are the smartest, then mules, then horses. When horses get scared, they run. When donkeys get scared they stop. They try to figure out what’s going to keep them safe and what’s going to hurt them.”
That’s because their ancestor, the African wild ass, is not a herd animal, according to Cappelli. “They have individual territories in the desert. They have to decide where to go and when to eat, run, or fight. Donkeys have retained some of that thoughtful intelligence,” he said. “They like to think for themselves.”
And with the wide range of vision that evolved as a result, as well as their big voices and big ears, which they used to heehaw to each other at the end of the day, donkeys are more likely to stand their ground and confront a threat than their easily spooked equine cousins.
So why, given their feistiness, their smarts, and their sheer congeniality, does the gap in prestige between horses and donkeys remain so wide?
For one thing, “donkeys take a commitment, their life span is 40 to 50 years, and it’s not for everybody,” said Cappelli, recalling the Donkey Welfare Symposium at Cornell he and Brockett attended last September with 77 diehard donkey enthusiasts present.
More than that, “you have to have a donkey attitude to love donkeys,” said Brockett, gently rubbing Sage’s ears as Patches the llama strutted about in the tranquil setting. “I come out here after work and it’s bliss.”
Tripledale Farm will be offering donkey rides at the Renaissance Faire in North Haven on Saturday and Sunday, May 13-14, May 20-21, and May 27-28, and donkey rides and a petting zoo at the Little Folks Fair in Guilford on Saturday, June 3. Check out their three-day display at the Guilford Fair on Sept. 15-17.