What do you give Huntsville’s favourite donkey for her 20th birthday?

Abigail, the resident donkey at Muskoka Heritage Place (MHP), is 20 years old—an event worthy of celebration. But what DO you give a donkey for such a milestone, particularly when she seems quite content with everything she has?

The answer: watermelon.

“That’s what she goes most crazy over,” says MHP’s general manager, Ron Gostlin, who recalls putting a whole watermelon in her enclosure which she promptly smashed into pieces and ate to her heart’s content. “There was watermelon everywhere.” Staff had a container of it on hand on August 23—her honorary birthday as no one’s quite sure what late-August date she was actually born—for anyone who wanted to give her a piece of her favourite treat.

She was born at Muskoka Heritage Place one August night in 1998. When staff arrived the next morning, then-resident donkey Rosie, who had been pregnant when they left the previous day, had her newborn foal beside her.

Abby has since spent her summers at MHP with an assortment of other farm animals—this year two pigs, three sheep and a flock of chickens—and her winters on a local farm with another donkey, some horses, and other animals. She’s like a mother to the sheep at MHP, who run to gather beneath her when something startles them. And she’s a much-loved attraction for visitors of all ages, who often feed her sweet grass—another favourite treat—plucked from around her enclosure.

Part of the attraction is that she’s a character. She might shun you if you don’t feed her. She might bray excitedly if you do. More than once she has escaped from her enclosure, but she doesn’t wander far—park staff have looked up from their work to find her peering in the window at them—and sometimes she just likes to go for a run, galloping the loop around the village again and again until she tires of the game and staff return her to her pen.

“She thinks she’s in the Kentucky Derby,” says Gostlin. “She’ll run around the village so fast—she’s pretty quick, she thinks she’s a racehorse.”

And she appears to have a sense of humour.

“There were people up at the gate saying, ‘Oh, what a majestic animal, oh, she’s so beautiful, she’s a gorgeous animal,” says her MHP caretaker, DJ. Abby promptly lifted her tail and let out a gaseous explosion, perhaps her version of a practical joke. “I didn’t train her to do that,” laughs DJ.

Although she lives a life of leisure, Abby, does have a purpose: education. “All the farm animals provide an opportunity for kids especially, who don’t get a chance to see what farm animals are and become familiar with them. It’s surprising, even kids from Orillia, which is not a massive urban centre, get here and they’ve never seen a pig or a sheep before and can’t relate that pork on a plate comes from a pig. We are fortunate that we can have that learning tool,” says Gostlin. “Plus, she’s fun.”

When school kids arrive for an education program, Abby heads for the fence to greet them, says Gostlin. “She really likes the attention. She’s a bit of a prima donna.”

Abigail in some of her finery (Photo: Muskoka Heritage Place)

And although the occasional person worries about how she is with people, DJ says she’s always gentle. “She just loves kids.” And she has delighted many of them over the past two decades.

It’s safe to say Abby has entered mid-life (20 donkey years equal about 60 human ones), but it’s likely that she’ll have many more years at Muskoka Heritage Place—well-cared-for donkeys like her can live to be more than 35 years old—and that’s good news for her legions of fans.

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