Donkeys have always shaped our view of the soul of animals, one of the first animal rescues in recorded history was a rescue of a condemned donkey by Jesus, who saved him and adopted him and rode him into Jerusalem. Early Christian writers like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas saw compassion and mercy for animals as a fundamental part of being human and learning to be human, of being spiritual. Throughout history, no animal has needed mercy and compassion more than the hard-working donkey, beasts of burden throughout human history, driven, beaten, overworked and abandoned in every part of the world.

I am thinking about this these days as I am working on my book about Simon – “Saving Simon, How A Rescue Donkey Taught Me The Meaning Of Compassion.” For centuries, “the great painters chose to view donkeys as spiritual companions in an ethereal realm of life and death; the donkey equals man in the theater of chance and is equally a part of that divine force in the universe, “write Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison in “Donkey: The Mystique of the Equus Asinus.”

From Don Quixote to Shrek, the idea of this equality, this partnership, speaks to the very particular place donkeys have held in our imagination and in the long and troubled history of mankind.

I love this notion of the donkey. Maria says I was never the same after Simon came to the farm, I changed the moment I saw him in that piteous state, something inside of me was rearranged, and perhaps I joined in that long and glorious history of wandering men and donkeys, moving together in the theater of chance, a divine force in the universe.