Some well-meaning students at Wilkes College have put together a fund raiser, a Donkey basketball game, for a good cause. They want to raise money for an equestrian adoption agency. More on why that’s a great idea in a moment.
But first the controversy.
The presumably well-meaning students at the college are getting their backs up, so to speak and planning a big protest today. Their claim is that the donkeys in the basketball game are mistreated, and malnourished.
Now I have played in two donkey basketball games in my life. The donkeys I have known from these ridiculous contests were in fine shape. Fine enough to kick my ass all over the place. They could not have possibly been malnourished because part of the fun is that the humans in the game have to clean up after their mounts. And we did a lot of cleaning up. As they say, what goes in must come out.
The alternatives for Donkeys these days are not real great. Not much call for the little critters with the cross on their back in today’s society. I picture the donkeys if left to their own devices to be like those on the island of misfit toys, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes.
Gangs of marauding donkeys will roam the streets doing vandalism and scaring the old ladies.
Donkeys in soup kitchens and at shelters with their pitiful “Ee aws†begging for food.
We don’t want that do we?
But seriously.
How bad can it be for the donkeys? An hour or two a day, throwing hapless would be basketball players to the floor and pooping all over the gym. Then the rest of of day, well, resting.
The horses that the fundraiser is for, on the other hand are not nearly so lucky.
Nearly 60,000 American horses are butchered each year for human consumption overseas. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the whole deal, from the time the horse owner is lied to about what is going to happen to the old grey mare, to the time it’s killed by a process known as the captive bolt which I wont describe here, is unspeakably brutal.
Horses that were content and well fed are crammed into trucks with other terrified horses and go for days without food or water. Some of these horses go insane and kicking and thrashing around break their own and other doomed horses legs and end their lives in agony.
So you be judge and jury here.
Donkeys in the Wilkes gym, or horses on the dinner table?
