burros em Portugal via NYT

Hard Times for a Small (and Fuzzy) Group of Europeans

João Pedro Marnoto for The New York Times

Gonçalo Domingues, 70, a Portuguese farmer, with his Miranda donkeys.

By RAPHAEL MINDER
Published: November 28, 2013

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PARADELA, Portugal — It’s not easy being a donkey today.

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First, there is the image problem. But that is an old one. More recently, there are modern intrusions and fading memories of the donkey’s role, even here in the highlands of northeastern Portugal, where for centuries indigenous Miranda donkeys helped farmers plow fields and carry goods.
After decades of neglect and, some argue, misunderstanding, the fate of the donkey has come to resemble that of its human counterparts in hard-pressed European hinterlands: threatened by declining population and dependent for its survival on, yes, subsidies from the European Union.
Now, in an era of austerity, even donkeys have been swept up in the debate over just how far the European Union should go to maintain its farming regions, which are facing cuts to their financial support. The aid this year amounts to $78 billion, or 43 percent of the European Union’s overall budget, but under a recently struck deal, the farm spending will fall slightly until 2020, to about $68 billion a year, accounting for 38 percent of the union’s budget.
Since 2003, the large and docile Miranda donkey, named after the area where it lives, Tierra de Miranda, has been listed as an endangered breed. The Miranda, which has white markings around its eyes and a thick coat that it sheds as it grows old, has steadily been displaced by the tractor and other modern farming equipment.
And as young people continue to leave rural areas for the cities, the donkeys are also being threatened because the farmers who once cared for them are growing too old to keep doing so.
“I remember donkeys would be seen walking along most of our roads, which really isn’t the case now,” said Filomena Afonso, the director of the animal genetic research department in Portugal’s Agriculture Ministry, who estimated that the country’s donkey population had fallen to a quarter of what it was in the 1970s.
Until recently, the Miranda donkey was “on a one-way road to extinction,” said Miguel Nóvoa, a veterinarian and the director of an association that keeps 140 Miranda donkeys in two shelters, one for breeding and the other for donkeys that are old or abandoned.
Thanks to the efforts of conservationists, who have used national and European Union subsidies to breed Miranda donkeys, the population has recently stabilized around 800. Farmers have also been able to apply for subsidies — $230 a year for each animal — which have persuaded more of them to keep their donkeys, despite their dwindling worth as farm labor.
Without those subsidies, “it would make no economic sense to keep my donkeys, however attached I am to them,” said Gonçalo Domingues, a 70-year-old farmer who has two Mirandas. Still, another farmer, Camilo da Igreja, sold his two donkeys in October, after hip surgery left him too weak to look after them.
In reality, at a cost of about $650 a year, it makes little economic sense to keep a donkey, even with the subsidies, experts say. “Farmers now own donkeys out of love rather than for the subsidies,” said Javier Navas, a veterinary scientist who is preparing a doctoral thesis about donkeys at the University of Córdoba, in Spain.
Conservationists say that donkeys remain under threat, not only in Southern Europe but across the Western world.
“People just don’t realize that the whole donkey species is in an endangered situation in Europe,” said Waltraud Kugler, a Switzerland-based project director at the SAVE Foundation, a European animal conservation organization.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations lists 53 donkey breeds spread across Europe, including Russia and some former Soviet republics. Ms. Kugler said her organization estimated that about 30 European breeds were at risk, each with a population under 1,000.
It has not helped, Ms. Kugler said, that the donkey has suffered from a bad image, which has left it little studied by scientists. “The donkey is seen as the stupid animal of the poor,” she said, “and that is a reputation that is very hard to get out of people’s heads.”