"People forget about them," Mark said. "Unlike a dog, they can't come in the house."
Amy, who grew up around horses, bought her first burro, Izzy, about two years ago as a companion to an aging gelding. She and her husband launched the rescue operation soon after.
Mark, an electrical contractor, has scaled back his work schedule in part to devote more time to the project, which received its nonprofit status in January. A burly man who admits he prefers animals to most people, Mark Meyers has become something of a public figure around these parts, running ads about the donkeys in the north county newspapers and educating people with appearances in local parades, as well as through the rescue Web site: http://www.donkeyrescue.org.
The family's five-acre spread is at the end of Peaceful Valley Road, in a pocket of dusty ranchland a few miles south of Palmdale. The air takes on the tang of animal flesh on the approach to the Meyerses' small, sky-blue ranch house. Their 25 donkeys share the property with five dogs, a cat, a bird, six goats, two horses and five children, who help with the feeding.
The neighbors are just far enough off to tolerate the donkeys' hee-haws, moans and foghorn honks.
Like proud parents, Mark and Amy Meyers can rattle off the names of each of their long-eared charges--the scruffy and the elegant, the sweet and the ornery, even the potentially dangerous.
"Some of them, you get in the pen with, they'll try to kill you," Mark said, approaching a sick black male named Elliot with a syringe full of antibiotics. "A horse's first instinct is to flee, but a donkey's first instinct is to fight. That's why a lot of [ranchers] keep them around as protection from coyotes."
Burros Suffer From Neglect, Mistreatment
Mark said another male in his care was typical of the more serious cases. Job, a dark brown 18-year-old from Lucerne Valley, was being "starved to death" by an increasingly forgetful man in his 90s, Mark said. Tiger, an 8-year-old female, was rescued from Doyle, Calif., after a man reported that the owner was throwing rocks at it. Rawhide, bought from a horse trader, has scars on his legs; cowboys had used the animal for roping practice--one of the more common abuses.
"People will say to us, 'We take good care of our roping donkeys,' " Amy said. "Well, you feed 'em and stuff, but that doesn't mean you're doing right by 'em."
