Anyone who uses the word "donkey" as an insult should come here, to Il Testardo rehabilitation center, and watch Socrates in action. Once, according to Claire Holme, the center's director, a girl was cleaning one of his hooves. She made a clumsy move and fell. Socrates, already off-balance, began to set his own hoof down — then realized it would hurt the child and lifted it back up instead. Few horses would show such restraint.
Socrates is the elder statesman of the group. At seventeen or eighteen, he's old for a donkey compared to the others here, though far from elderly for a quadruped that can live past forty. He moves freely among humans and animals, bound together in this "strange" place in the heart of Verona, as if he owns the whole establishment. He pauses to watch a woman groom a mare. He accepts apples and affection with equal pleasure. He inserts himself into human conversation. And yet he has every reason to distrust our kind. He came from Romania, where he hauled gas cylinders and heavy loads that left his back, in the local vernacular, painfully "saddle-worn." Instead, he has become a model of balance for his companions: sweet Grisette, the stallion Filippo of the prized Amiata breed, and little Angeletta, just five months old, who fascinates the Neapolitan mastiff Tequila.
Then there is Tarik, half donkey and half zebra — an experiment common in Africa, where donkeys are crossed with zebras to create animals immune to certain diseases. Zebras have little patience; donkeys are made of it. At seven months old, Tarik has yet to show which side of his nature will prevail.
What Donkeys Do Here
What is the work of these donkeys? Claire Holme explains it simply: they carry.
Children and adults arrive at the center carrying their own burdens — physical and psychological disabilities, trauma from violence, difficulty forming bonds with others. The first relationship they make is with a donkey. And in this work, a donkey can often outperform a horse. A donkey moves at his own steady pace and responds well to almost anything. Even if a schizophrenic client shouts in his ear, he plants his feet with that sympathetic stubbornness that once earned him blows from impatient farmers and now earns him only caresses and carrots. Horses excel in the second phase of therapy — the discipline now called equine therapy is well documented — but for that crucial first approach, a donkey is often better.
Watch a boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve encounter a donkey for the first time. The boy bears visible marks of difference that the wider world has made painful. The girl was abandoned by her parents; she has retreated into a silence that is not quite autism but is profound damage nonetheless.
Donkeys have the capacity to offer tolerance to human beings who have found so little of it in the world of men
Donkeys have the capacity to offer tolerance to human beings who have found so little of it in the world of menIt is a lesson for all of us to see how donkeys accept — as so many humans do not — this kind of difference. How they allow themselves to be ridden, to be touched, to take food gently from a hand. Claire Holme, half Italian and half English, has directed this center for a year, though she dreamed of it for five. She has always loved animals deeply. She remembers with emotion a mare that helped pull her out of the depression she fell into after her father's death. One day she asked herself why she loved them so much, and the answer came clear: animals are, in certain ways, an irreplaceable channel of life itself. So she resolved to make that truth into her work — a work in service of people. Il Testardo, born from stubborn determination despite countless obstacles we can all imagine, operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone here — animal handlers, doctors, psychologists — works without pay. Those who come for help pay nothing. Men and animals move in a current of relationships that often opens into moments of genuine joy. Like the day, not long ago, when a mare loosened her hold on a
A Message of Hope
Il Testardo, modest as it is, carries a message of hope for a species that has little reason for it. The donkey, who has endured so many blows in his history, must sometimes miss even those days — at least then he was valued as a useful animal. Today his market is thin. He survives mainly as meat, as those appalling trucks from the East demonstrate, cramming over a hundred donkeys into a single vehicle. Here, in this place, the donkey returns in the new millennium with a role both beautiful and unexpected. To offer tolerance to human beings who have found so little of it in the world of men.
- Ruggero Leonardi, 2000 -
(article from "Visto" di Verona)
===FINE===