donkeys

Photo: Geza Farkas (Shutterstock)Amazon is done making an ass of itself, and making snacks out of ass, as the digital marketplace will no longer sell edible donkey meat in California. The online retailer will not allow Californians to buy hundreds of donkey-based snacks listed on the platform as part of a settlement, according to Wired. But don’t worry, you can still buy them in the 49 other states.Top 5 Shopping Tips for Amazon Prime DayA quick Amazon search for “ejiao” will result in hundreds of products containing…

The war, unsurprisingly, has made conservation a lot harder. Oleg Dyakov, a rewilding officer from Rewilding Ukraine’s head office in Odesa and one of the organization’s cofounders, recounts the hazards his teams have faced with a casual frustration. Marine mines drifting in from the Black Sea stalled the release of fallow deer, and monitoring activities of Dalmatian Pelicans were limited to binoculars and telescopes because parts of the Delta were restricted by the Ukrainian government. (In peacetime, they’d have been…

Donkeys are a main source of labor in countries like rural South Africa, but the cruel ‘ejiao’ trade has decimated donkey populations in many places that depend on them.Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)Amazon is facing a stampede of protest over third-party vendors being allowed to sell donkey-based products. A few Donkey-based items, remedies, and snacks easily found on the digital marketplace are products of an international, inhumane slaughter of donkeys, and one California-based equine nonprofit wants Amazon to ban…

Cannes Jury Prize winner ‘EO’ shares vision of modern Europe through lens of a donkey(Pic Credit: IANS) The trailer of the upcoming drama film, ‘EO’, directed by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, was unveiled recently. The film, inspired by Robert Bresson’s 1966 film ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’, follows the life of a donkey born in a Polish circus. The film, which shared the Cannes Jury Prize with Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s ‘The Eight Mountains’, shares a vision of modern Europe through the prism…

Donkeys are a ubiquitous beast of burden, and are regularly employed to slog materials across long distances, just like they were in the ancient past. Now, a team of geneticists has pinpointed exactly how ancient that past is: They believe they’ve determined when and where the first donkeys were domesticated.By looking at 238 donkey genomes—31 of which belonged to ancient donkeys—the team identified a domestication event in East Africa that dates to about 5,000 BCE, slightly earlier than the earliest archaeological…

Donkeys may lack the popularity and prestige of horses, but these diminutive equines played an outsize role in human history. Now, an extensive analysis of the genomes of both modern and ancient donkeys reveals they were domesticated only once, in East Africa around 5000 B.C.E. Soon after, they rapidly spread throughout Eurasia and became distinctive populations, with limited mixing between them. That likely helped donkeys adapt to serve as critical pack animals for…

For humans and wildlife alike, feral donkeys can be a pain in the ass. Large and full of attitude, the scruffy vegetation-destroying equids steal resources from native sheep and tortoises, poop in precious spring water, and cost many a park manager a good night’s sleep. They aren’t unstoppable, however. In Death Valley National Park, researchers have captured the first photographic evidence of donkeys falling prey to the claws of a native predator: the cougar. The relationship is…