Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1162395
NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 38 SEPTEMBER 2019 On a Sunday morning last fall, I took on a simple task: Lead Jasper by his reins through the woods as leaves crunch underfoot. Keep him focused. Breathe. Jasper is a four-year-old gray donkey, a rescue who arrived on the North Shore angry and bedraggled from a Texas kill shelter two years ago, and who is now more like a large dog, eating peppermint treats out of my hand. Jasper and a black miniature horse named Romeo, who now greets the elderly in nursing homes, were saved from a gruesome fate thanks to the Equine Rescue Network, an organization formed in 2009 here on the North Shore. The two animals now live—along with other twitchy ears, long, batting eyelashes, and round bellies covered in grays, black, and tans—in a paddock at an expansive North Shore farm, where a Sunday ritual invites volunteers of all stripes to walk these once- mistreated creatures through woods and green pastures, soothing them along the way. "If you're an animal in 2019, I feel sorry for you. We're not an animal-friendly society anymore," says Janine Jacques, who started the Equine Rescue Network at her family farm in Ipswich. In order to save these animals, Jacques says she is fighting against China's cosmetics industry. Donkey hides go for big money to be ground into women's face cream, prompting the Chinese to consume 1.4 million donkeys a year, says Jacques. A cube of a donkey's hide is worth more than a cube of gold, she says. "They are consuming the world's donkey population." When I recently spoke to Jacques on the phone at her day job as a dean at the New England College of Business, she had received a text message that two donkeys had just been loaded up in a Texas kill pen to travel to their rescuers in Kentucky, Virginia, and Massachusetts. She will pay $250 to $350 per donkey. "I sit in my office in Boston or in line at Starbucks receiving photos of these animals from the shippers," she says. "Then I electronically send the money for them." Every year, Jacques celebrates her birthday by going to a big auction in Pennsylvania and saving animals. But not all can be saved. Some have slipped through her fingers. A two-year- old colt with burrs in its mane, a horse that had never been touched, still haunts her. The trailer was full of rescues and she simply couldn't take another, and he was bought by one of the kill buyers. "I can't get his face out of my head," she says of the colt, as we lead a pack of recovering horses, mini horses, and donkeys from a big pasture to the gravel road leading back to the stables. Each year, Olympic trials are held on the farm here for dressage and hunter/jumper classic categories. You wouldn't expect to find a bunch of damaged animals being boarded here, but it is possible through the kindness of the farm's owners, says Jacques. Ann Getchell, whose family owns the farm, has been surprised at how much she loves the donkeys. She has adopted three gray donkeys with big cross-shaped markings on their backs. "I'm kind of a sucker for these," says Getchell. "We have all this family property. I can't think of anything else my mother would have wanted up there in the barn." Probably because I've been paying more attention, I've noticed an uptick in donkeys and talk of donkeys in the area. A local marathoner now takes a tiny donkey, appropriately named Dash, on long runs in Bradley Palmer State Park. Anytime you see a donkey on the North Shore, it probably came through the Equine Rescue Network, which saves up to 200 donkeys and big mules a year—and then there are the horses. While a scared horse will run, says Jacques, a frightened donkey will stand still. "It makes all the difference in the world. Donkeys think through processes." Many are now familiar with donkeys as aids in conflict resolution, when a group who can't get along must work together to try to budge the animal. "People think donkeys are stubborn," says Jacques. "They aren't at all, but when you get in a hurry and your energy changes, they say, 'No. I'm not moving.' You can't get anxious. Be confident, and then a donkey will do anything." Jacques grew up riding competitively, and rescue horses were her family's passion. "I don't know if I'd know what to do on a horse that knows what to do," she says while brush- ing Renegade, a rescued Amish driving horse who wasn't up for the task of steering families L I V E + P L AY Volunteers work with the donkeys so they become comfortable being around people.