Life is tough for donkeys in Catalonia

There are two types of Catalan donkeys. The first, and most visible, is the sticker, a simple donkey silhouette that adorns the back of many cars: the campaign began ten years ago, initiated by two young men from Banyoles (Girona) and the search for ” “Oppose the monolithic centralism expressed in symbols such as the bull or Spanish license plates. ” The friendly donkey, with its pricked ears and white nose, suddenly became a political symbol: its well-known stubbornness in the face of the somewhat thoughtless pushes of the bullfighting bull symbolizes resistance, difference and independence.

The other donkey is, of course, a real one, who knows nothing about politics or symbolic wars. The Catalan donkey is a robust, fat breed, perfect for hard work, with its ears always erected, expressing, as experts say, a temperament of “optimism, energy and nobility”. For some time, the flesh-and-blood donkeys have been infected by the popularity of their sticky counterparts: sales, sponsorships, group visits to the farms have surged… But it’s a bad time for them, right now, when the independence movement is booming. The donkey that represents him.

Joan Gassó, director of the Fuives Centre des Donkeys Catalana (the main sanctuary for the Catalan donkey), has sounded the alarm. Gassó says the economic crisis has seriously endangered the breed’s survival: “Since it no longer has any use, it has been pushed into a corner, abandoned, and unfortunately nothing has been done. The relevant agencies have taken action.” But “what they offer is totally insufficient. Before, they were sold to make mules, clear forests, and even as pets, but they are being sold less and less, and the future is very complicated.”

Gold diggers

Joan Gassó, son of the other Joan Gassó, who died two years ago, has played a key role in the recovery of the breed. The mechanization of the countryside had reduced the census to witness figures, and the livestock trader, nostalgic for the golden days of the fairs of Montmajor or Vic, decided to restore the local donkeys through a simple procedure of acquiring all the specimens he found. This was the seed of the current reserve in the Berguedà region in 1971: of the approximately 700 registered in the conservation program, the Fuives currently have more than 100, but in recent years they have reduced the herd because they had become unsustainable. “I had 150, but I have been reducing them to limit expenses. The problem is that it takes a lot of people to maintain and improve a breed: with few people you have to be very careful about inbreeding,” says Joan, who continues the work of his father.

On his farm, he has initiated multiple avenues of financing. “To make money, we do everything: we sponsor donkeys, people take them for walks, we host groups, we sell semen…” he lists. They even make cosmetics from donkey milk, like the one Cleopatra or Nero’s wife allegedly used to bathe in. Joan likes to recall the glory days of the Catalan donkey, when it was exported in large quantities to the United States to produce strong and powerful mules, “like the mules that the gold diggers carried”, and she does not hesitate to call this breed “the best in the world”. For years, his company has publicly praised stubbornness as an admirable trait in chicks and humans: “It is an underestimated trait, but essential to pull a cart and achieve any goal. It is a trait that few animals have, none like the donkey. The Catalan, a timeless beast, self-sacrificing, is smarter than we think”.

In his defence of real animals, Garceau sometimes comes close to the rhetoric of stickers, and he launched a few years ago the campaign “One Catalan sponsors another”. Is their unexpected status as a symbol and their omnipresence in Catalan communities and on cars in Roussillon good for these donkeys? “Any topic involving donkeys benefits them. But it’s a marketing question, there are people who are in the business of merchandising. In reality, there are very good bulls, very good donkeys, and we have to do our best to protect them.”