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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: July-August 2007

Saving wild burros in their native habitat

 

OLANCHA, California--Wild Burro Rescue founder Diana Chontos has in common with the film ogre Shrek that she lives in a stone house in the middle of nowhere, is a seldom-seen legend, and puts saving her asses ahead of the comfort of a damsel in frequent distress.

Among the differences are that Shrek memorably saved one ass, in his 2001 screen debut. Chontos had already saved hundreds, beginning in 1984. Shrek lives in a swamp, with abundant water. Chontos lives in the high desert near parched Owens Lake, drained in the early-20th century water diversion scandal dramatized by Jack Nicholson in the 1974 film Chinatown.

Chontos herself could play the damsel in distress, possibly with significantly greater fundraising success, but the role never suited her.

"Kiss our asses," the Wild Burro Rescue bumper stickers proclaim.

Like the resident wild burros themselves, Chontos and Wild Burro Rescue are wiry, independent, lean and enduring. Hard times have been frequent, prosperity just a rumor. Much of the time Chontos has only one or two hardy volunteers for help, or none at all. She has no paid staff, barely managing to pay herself grocery money.

 


A comparatively small investment of under $350,000 could pay off the mortgage on the spectacularly scenic 140-acre sanctuary and all other debts, drill a reliable well, supply adequate electricity, add barns enough to give all of the burros shelter (if they choose to use it) and fix up buildings on the property that could accommodate visiting volunteers.

Many other sanctuaries in southern California raise $350,000 in a couple of months, taking advantage of proximity to Hollywood and the Silicon Valley.

But Wild Burro Rescue is well off the beaten track, almost off of any track at all, and while Shrek was at a loss when asked to feed a donkey, Shrek might know more about organizing a celebrity gala.

 

What fortune blew Wild Burro Rescue's way was a howling wind storm at Halloween 2003 that tumbled a four-equine trailer like a cardboard box, wrecking it. An inebriated volunteer--no longer associated with Wild Burro Rescue--later wrecked the larger of the two WBR water tankers. The smaller tanker--with a leaky tank--collects water for the burros several times a day from a recreational vehicle park whose owner is sympathetic toward animals, and allows Chontos to use her showers.

The RV park is near the turn-off from Route 395 to Wild Burro Rescue. A dirt road takes visitors across the Los Angeles Aqueduct to a narrower dirt road mined with boulders so large that truckloads of fill would be needed if they were bulldozed out.

Fenced burro compounds stand alongside the lower part of the access road. More burro compounds and wooden former bunkhouses surround the shaded stone headquarters. The headquarters gets some electricity from solar panels and batteries, but the property has no refrigeration and no running water other than winter runoff from the Inyo Mountains.

East of the Inyo National Forest and Sierra Nevada mountains, just west of Death Valley, the sanctuary now harbors about 180 wild burros rescued from National Park Service land where they would otherwise have been shot, miscellaneous mules and horses taken in from domestic situations, about 20 dogs and cats who have found their way there or have been dumped nearby, and wildlife including black bears, pumas, bobcats, coyotes, and sidewinder rattlesnakes.

The wild predators and rattlesnakes are more a threat to human intruders than the predator-and-snake-savvy wild burros. Few predators will risk a burro kick. Snakes avoid being trampled. Foals might become puma prey if Chontos allowed breeding, but--as in the wild--the jacks and jennies are living in separate herds. Many of the jacks are gelded. The only young equines on the premises are the foals of animals who were pregnant when recently rescued.

The sanctuary site was previously a hunting ranch. Hunting and shooting of any kind have been prohibited since Wild Burro Rescue bought the site in 2000. Meat is not allowed on the premises, either.

"Talking to someone about myself beyond my life with burros seems abstract to me now," Chontos mused in 1993, as one of the first sanctuarians ANIMAL PEOPLE profiled. "My life has become burros and their survival. I am a daughter of the pioneers of Washington," she said, "and continue to live by many of the same values as my great-grandparents, except that during my childhood I found the practice of slaughtering and eating animals abhorrent. As soon as I possibly could," she recalled, "I became a vegetarian."

Her first animal rescue, she said, came at age 13, when "I rode my horse, galloping bareback, between a gun-happy bounty hunter and a beautiful coyote I had been watching as she caught and ate grasshoppers."

Chontos and her former husband founded Wild Burro Rescue at Onalaska, Washington, in 1984. They began by adopting four burros from Death Valley National Park. Four years later, they moved to a larger site in the foothills north of Mount St. Helens.

"We had a dream: to walk away into the mountains and not return," Chontos said. "We would travel with our burros, and people would be able to see what wonderful animals these wild ones are. We could educate people about the issues and prove to many that wild burros should never be shot."

Setting out in July 1990 on a planned two-year trek, the founders participated in the rescue of 123 mustangs in Oregon, then learned that "A herd of wild burros had been rounded up and were being held in northern Nevada, awaiting slaughter. Faced with the choice of saving the burros and taking them to our home in Washington, or continuing our trek, we saved the burros."

The California Desert Protection Act in 1994 transferred tens of thousands of acres of land from the Bureau of Land Management to the National Park Service, with catastrophic effect for 1,400 wild burros in the Mojave Desert plus 500 in Death Valley. On BLM land, the burros were safe from slaughter, under the 1971 Wild and Free Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act. On National Park Service land, they were deemed an "alien species," slated for "direct reduction," a euphemism for shooting them.

Wild Burro Rescue prevented the anticipated burro massacre by negotiating annual burro captures that kept the population from increasing. Relocating from southern Washington to southern California became essential to sustaining the operation.

While Wild Burro Rescue has succeeded in saving many burros to live out their natural lives in semi-native habitat, Chontos has yet to achieve her greater goal of persuading wildlife policy-makers to appreciate North American wild burros as a uniquely adapted subspecies, some twice the size of the Spanish domestic donkeys from whom they are descended, closer in habits to zebras.

Approximately half of the former wild burro range in the U.S. is now closed to burros, Chontos points out. Fewer wild burros remain in the whole U.S. than existed in southern California alone circa 35 years ago.

Chontos notes that bighorn sheep hunters are especially hostile toward wild burros, as perceived rivals of sheep. While burro management is not a money-maker for wildlife agencies, the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep in 2002 auctioned just 20 bighorn sheep hunting permits for more than $2 million.

[Contact Wild Burro Rescue c/o P.O. Box 10, Olancha, CA 93549; 760-764-2136; fax 240-244-8498; <wildburrorescue@gmail.com>; <www.wildburrorescue.org>.]