#TwT imagine....a donkey drawing

[sanchoyo]

today is world donkey day apparently, so I was going to draw a lil doodle of mira with her donkey right. so I go 2 google it (have not googled her specific donkey type, the woolly páramo donkey, since I made her possibly, in like, ..2014?? usually I just type in baby donkey for refs, lmao)

and ive gone down a rabbit hole.

bear with me.

this is going to be a Long One.

there's almost NOTHING abt the 'woolly paramo donkey' on the internet. there's a blogsite from 2011 saying "Another endangered species of donkey is the Woolly Paramo Donkey. It can be found in high elevations of up to 3,000 m altitude and the permanent snow line of about 5,000 meters. It can be found in Colombia." which, I assume in 2014, when making Mira, I googled 'endangered donkeys' and this popped up. And I did not look further. until now.

if you google that passage, or anything related to páramo woollies, they just. don't seem to EXIST???! there's one page that copy and pastes the above paragraph word for word, but it was published in 2015, so. it also just scrubbed info from the aforementioned blog that seems to be run by a rando with no...sources or expertise at all....fabulous. okay. kept digging.

this page cites the pictured donkey as a woolly páramo donkey, except, that is in Ireland. not anywhere near páramo! (and sure, exporting animals is a Thing, but...the caption says its a subspecies of the paramo donkeys???!) (and, for the record, were going with the wiki's definition of paramo here: "A narrower term classifies the páramo according to its regional placement in the northern Andes of South America and adjacent southern Central America.") so we're looking for donkeys around there. more on that later.

but for now, The ENGLISH wikipedia page for Páramo (region) does not include ANYTHING about donkeys. which. if it was an endangered species, wouldn't it be notable?? however, the image the first blog uses...IS on wikipedia, and is cited. as being taken in 2007, possibly one of the earliest pics of said donkey type, and was in Chimborazo, Ecuador which iS IN THE PARAMO ECOSYSTEM OKAY WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE. RIGHT. THERE'S DONKEYS THERE. I knew that from looking up travel iteraries around Columbia's paramo. what I need to know tho is...ARE THEY A SPECIFIC, ENDANGERED SPECIES/SUBSPECIES/ RARE BREED?! ANYTHING???

The guy who's credited with the photo...unless its a case of the same name (which would be a hell of a coincidence, in this case) has scientific papers out about the paramo region! but...I have to request access to them, and most of them are in spanish, and who knows if they mention donkeys at all or the guy just put pics of them on wikipedia to be nice. like, I know donkeys do live there, but it doesn't seem to be a specific species, more like this is 'a woolly donkey of the paramo region' from the translation of the title of the photo. woolly donkeys can be anywhere!

WELL. the wikipedia photo is used on the ITALIAN WIKIPEDIA PAGE FOR PARAMO. and it lacks info which makes me scream. just calling it a 'woolly paramo donkey' and not elaborating is EVIL is it a reg donkey or NOT

looking into woolly donkeys alone, which I KNOW are a thing, this page cites the miniature woolly variation as rare, saying there are only 400-ish in the US. cool, that's a rare breed, if true. different from being an endangered species, though!!! totally different thing!!! and that linked page is from a breeder with no cited sources, and their last news update was...2019.

the smithsonian estimates miniature donkeys in general to at 10,000-20,000, so 400 of those being woolly seems to be..lowballing the amount of woollies? possibly? seems very low...esp for something with high cuteness appeal that would be a hit at fairs, competitions, or petting zoos. but if true thats at least...a rare breed... which is something...

(there are Poitou donkeys, if nothing else, which are confirmed to be a Thing, woolly, and endangered. quite frankly if I was going to change her to any other donkey, this would be it. its not on the red data list, but it is on the FAO endangered list, which is like. close enough yk?)

back to the paramo donkeys specifically. in my desperation, I asked bing's AI to scrub the web for ANYTHING about them. not that AI is always right, but it is Fast. it said "There is no scientific record of a species known as the “Woolly Paramo Donkey” living in high altitudes or near permanent snow." which...yeah. starting to Doubt it's existence. by this point.

just when I thought 'this thang isn't real, oh god I might have to pick a new donkey for Mira.....' I Found it somewhere unexpected.

a blog post about farmville 2. yeah the old facebook game! why is it here???! the game came out in 2012, so it had to be pulling the name from an earlier source, and was not where the blogs were getting their info (and thank god for that) but...even looking into reputable sources for THAT is hard to find??! its not on the farmville 2 wiki (LMAO) there's other species of donkey on the game, but none matching these low res pics that pop up on random cheatcode blogs when I look for possible sources?

both of these images/img descriptions call it the woolly paramo donkey. and seem to be reasonably well rendered, and can be found across a few other farmville 2 blogs/guides... (the first img being a baby, the scond being adult vers) I can't really imagine boomers who play farmville going to the effort to photoshop fake upgrades in 2012 for farmville 2... but its not on the fan wiki, which usually cite their sources. I am not playing farmville 2 to investigate this further, but its WEIRD!!! esp since farmville does have woolly donkeys, and the above are NOT just colorovers of them! where...where was farmville drawing the "woolly paramo donkey" name from.

anyway, enough about farmville it really isnt THAT important but it blows my mind the name woolly paramo donkey slipped into there somehow. how. who. & its supposedly in a game called 'island paradise' but I couldn't find pictures of it. but its got its own wiki fan page as well...??

so, anyway, back to the actual research, here's a map of where the paramo ecosystem is. and a map from 2018 on a reputable government website regarding donkey populations. (most recent study I could find, unfortunately!) there could very well be an endangered or at least rare subspecies/breed of donkey around there! (by the way, there ARE woolly MONKEYS around the area. surely no one with dyslexia like me read monkeys as donkeys and ran with it right. RIGHT.)

but...there's not one listed under the red data list's website under the name paramo or even any woollies. tbf, the red data website is moreso for wild animals, rather than rare domestic breeds). so I thought hm. okay. time to try something else. I checked for endangered south american donkeys in general. narrowed it down by possible countries. I checked every search engine I have bookmarked, including one that searches for scientific articles/books exclusively. I checked the dang wikipedia list of donkeys. (which, by the way? severely lacking info in general)

NOTHING. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE WOOLLY PARAMO DONKEY BREED, EXCEPT CITED ON THOSE RANDOM BLOGS, AND THAT SINGLE WIKIPEDIA PHOTO. unless...the region it would be in would be spanish-speaking.... there MIGHT be websites on it that I can't even read or find because I'm not using the right terms...OOF. I tried a few words for donkey (burro, burra, burrico,) paired with paramo, and I just kept getting a book result. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. not related at all, sadly, just includes a donkey in the story and the word paramo in the title.

I guess u could say the woolly paramo donkey was just a mirage? :) (loud booing)

anyway, all of this to say, the breed is most likely not real, or if they are, not documented online. from what I can tell, it seems to just be that woolly donkeys in general are rare, and while they do live in that area, are not proper endangered animals/species if we want to get hung up on semantics. but I'm not changing it for the comic. having her be a (possibly) fake donkey breed is objectively kind of funny, and it was already mentioned in chapter 1!

unless shirogane has decoy DNAs in the event of a break in and that was one of them. oops, all placebo. her mew power comes from, like, the power of belief or whatever. joke joke joke this is not lore its a joke

whatever. I had fun digging for a while! happy world donkey day. petition for a donkey emoji btw ^_^