Get Your Ass to Work!: An Illustrated Guide to Training Your Donkey to Harness

A detailed and practical guide to training donkeys―for farmers and homesteaders

So you’ve gone and done it, you’ve bought a donkey! You know she can be useful around the farm―that’s why you bought her. You know that throughout history, the donkey has been one of our most useful partners in labor: a low-impact power source that also produces fertilizer. But now, as she stands there eating, how do you get any of that dreamed-of usefulness out of her? This book can show you how.

Get Your Ass to Work! is a practical, hands-on guide to training donkeys to work―in harness and packing―to serve the needs of small farmers and homesteaders. It offers a clear and detailed program for each step of training, designed to enable you to bring an untrained donkey into the animal work force within a month or six weeks.

Although there are several books in print of general interest on donkeys and donkey care, none deal satisfactorily with training. Get Your Ass to Work! will help you train your donkey to haul loads on a sled or cart, pull farm equipment, skid logs, and pack firewood, tools, or camping gear while respecting and protecting the health of your animal and keeping you safe. The book outlines how to care for your donkey, including feed, shelter, and basic hoof care. The text is abundantly illustrated by original photographs of donkeys working, with artistic sketches and diagrams to show techniques.

This book will be relevant to the homesteader and small farmer, enjoyable for everyone who enjoys donkeys and mules, and appealing to any animal lover.

Dick Courteau has 75 years of experience working with and training equines. His earliest memories, from infancy, are seeing teams of horses at work in Minnesota farm country. He has been riding and working horses―and then mules and donkeys―since age 11. He moved West to work on ranches and by his late teens, was breaking horses for a living in Montana. He sought out mentors could among farm and ranch crews, supplemented by wide reading on horsemanship.

After leaving the West, he spent some years in academia, then settled on a homestead in the Ozarks, where he used horses to herd cattle, till a market garden, and skid logs in a small selective harvest. In 1980, he took his wife and three young children on a 700-mile journey Arkansas to Nebraska in a horse-drawn covered wagon.

After years of working with horses, he found himself with a donkey, and has spent 30 years training them for himself and others, and developing ways to work with their distinctive personalities. Dick is eager to share knowledge gained from a lifetime of rigorous labor with equines, combined with lots of “book learnin’” and his youthful access to oral folk wisdom.