Donkeys and me: education specialist, Michelle Whitham-Jones

What is your role and what does it involve? 

I love working towards a better life experience for donkeys and mules through my role as Head of Education at The Donkey Sanctuary. 

We have a diverse and dynamic team who have a broad range of expertise particularly in digital education, veterinary education, animal welfare and, of course, all things donkey and mule. The team spans the globe, so we mostly work online but get together as much as possible.

We obviously have lots of donkey knowledge across our charity and some really inspirational experts, but I like to think of our department as facilitators of knowledge exchange. Our resources and training are free, and we work with a diverse range of people from Guardian homes in the UK to university academics and students across the world. 

One of the most exciting things is that I get to bring people together with this common aim to positively influence the lives of donkeys and mules, and their health and welfare.

That sounds like a huge remit!

It’s grown exponentially over the last three years; there are a lot of people out there who care about donkeys and mules. My team has broadened to meet the challenge.

How did your childhood influence your relationship with animals?

My parents are Maltese-English, so I spent my childhood between Malta and the UK.

In Malta there’s a tourist tradition called the karozzin, which is a horse-drawn carriage run by self-employed guys. It’s often passed down through families and they basically carry tourists. I was always fascinated by the horses. You were never allowed to touch them, they were working. But in the evening they’d come down to my hometown and the men would let the horses swim. I’d never seen a horse swimming in the sea. The horses would mill around together, socialise and unwind, and the men would be talking, smoking. Then they’d all go home. In the day, the horses look the same, but in the evening, you see all these different characters. You get to know the white horse is the funny one. The dark one’s a bit scared.

There is an awful lot of welfare criticism of this practice, and I really get why because it is a hard life, but the drivers I saw really knew their horses and the horses knew them. It was quite incredible to watch, and I wanted that embodied human-horse relationship too.

So then as a teenager in the UK, I volunteered at a riding school. But I got attached to the horses and worried about what their lives were like - all these people coming and going - and I couldn’t cope with it. 

I decided I didn’t want to be around animals that were made to work. I wanted to focus on wild animals which, as a young person, I thought were basically lions and dolphins. But later on, I realised that ‘work’ is a human definition.

Some human-equid relationships that are labelled as work can be mutually beneficial. But on the other hand, activities that we consider leisure quite often involve harsh or restrictive methods, which wouldn’t be the equids’ choice of leisure, I’m sure. 

What mattered most wasn’t the human definition, it was how the equid experienced what they were doing. 

What was your career like before The Donkey Sanctuary?

I became a science teacher, then specialised in special educational needs for over 20 years.

I loved teaching, enabling young people and working with kids who had additional challenges like poverty, family instability, physical or mental difficulties. All of them needed compassion and knowing them required good observation. You needed to understand how they’d communicate, their energy and their motivation by putting yourself in their shoes. That’s where I thrived. Some of that previous understanding of thinking about the animal’s perspective helped me understand people too.

Then later on, I was principal of a specialist school where we had school dogs, and the relationship between a few of the kids and the dogs was just striking. I had also previously experienced sessions with Riding for the Disabled with mixed results.

Ready for a new challenge, I saw the advert for the PhD on the benefits of donkey-assisted therapy and was really lucky to be selected. Doing the PhD was truly life transforming. Afterwards, I taught Anthrozoology (human-animal interactions) in universities for a while. 

Then the job of Head of Education came up at The Donkey Sanctuary and I’ve never looked back. I feel like the knowledge that I’ve had from teaching young people with additional needs, and using unconventional ways of learning, has prepared me to work with animals and work with people learning about animals as well. 

Can you tell us more about your PhD research into donkey-assisted activities?

My brief was to identify the benefits of donkey-assisted activities for young people with autism. Autism was my specialist subject. 

However, I was really uncomfortable with using the label ‘autism’ as some kind of description for a deficit or testing how donkey-assisted activities can close the gap between an autistic child and a fictitious ‘normal’ child. That would have been demeaning and not worth measuring. Autism is a diversity for sure however, in some ways we are all diverse, after all, there is no test for the fictitious norm.

The other thing, of course, is that donkeys have massively diverse characters and personalities. They can be incredible problem solvers and deep thinkers. I did a lot of observation, and many acted differently depending on who they were with, what day it was, what mood they were in or what had happened just before they came into the space.

Focusing on the children would have been half the story. I needed to know what the donkeys were getting out of it. Not just for welfare, but for the scientific validity of the whole thing.

Fortunately for me, my Donkey Sanctuary mentor was a scientist herself and really open about my concerns, extensive variables and impossible methodology. We had a rethink and settled on ‘Reframing Donkey Assisted Activity: analysis of engagement between autistic children and donkeys’. 

Reframing involved understanding the quality of the engagement and that the relationships were complex, unpredictable and changed every single time. It had to acknowledge the donkey’s experience as well as the child’s.

I concluded that we’ve got to be realistic about expectations for animal-assisted activity and really understand the experience of all the participants - human and non-human - to make a value judgement.

Animal-assisted activities should not be sold as a panacea to solve human issues. You’re talking about individuals, both human and non-human. It can be good for some, on that day, and it may not be for others. That was my conclusion, so it went against the grain at the time, although these days it is more easily accepted.

What was the legacy of the research for The Donkey Sanctuary? 

We stopped riding completely and moved to interactions on the ground. And the donkeys were free to interact or not, as were the children. 

There is also somebody assigned to the donkey for their wellbeing, as well as somebody watching the child - it is impossible for one person to watch both and ensure their wellbeing.

Sessions now enable the curious donkeys to enjoy the novelty factor of the humans and, indeed, the humans understand that the donkeys may chose to do something different than being with them, and that is celebrated.

Why does it mean to treat all beings as an individual?

The importance of taking everyone as an individual, whether human or non-human, is how I think about the world. The species of an animal gives us a general description of them, but in that there are individual differences in character, body type, history etc.

Although we are human, there are definitely people we relate to and ones we really don’t. Some humans have done terrible things to others over the centuries, and I would really resent being compared to them, just because we are the same species.

It strikes me as odd that we often use the word ‘humane’ to describe ethical or kind treatment, but I am not sure humanity should be the yardstick for that when there are plenty of other species who live much more harmoniously than our own. 

Within our Donkey Sanctuary curriculums and learning resources, we only focus on animals as a species when talking about something specific in the anatomy or typical traits.

In all of our training, we use ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’ to describe donkeys. We never use ‘it’ and we’ve worked really hard for all of our teams not to either. That’s a big change and has created a real psychological shift as well. You think differently if you are forced into using personal language. 

We’ve also worked really hard on the imagery that we use, because donkeys have been unfairly ridiculed for so many years in film and media as a source of humour. We’re very meticulous about not objectifying donkeys in our work. That really matters. 

What is your message to the world?

It’s definitely a call for greater compassion and respect for all the other animals we share the planet with.

A lot of the research and technology that we know about has given us ever more sophisticated ways to understand how individual animals perceive the world. You can measure feelings, emotions, pain, behaviour, etc… AI is helping us with that as well. 

But if people took the time to use their own senses and truly observe each other, as individuals, against the moral compass that you attribute to yourself, then we can build this more compassionate, respectful relationship.

If people could remove all the labels or expectations of what the animal in front of them is - you wear this one, you eat that one, one is your pet etc - they would feel differently. 

It really challenges people to think this way because it’s against the status quo, but that’s what my PhD gave me the privilege to be able to do. I really believe the only way we’re going to make any difference in this climate and biodiversity crisis, is if we start thinking that we are within the world and not a separate part, exempt from consequences of destructive behaviour. 

We should lose the labels and categories that justify mistreatment and observe what is in front of us, if we learn to look.