The tale of a donkey named Diesel that went missing only to turn up five years later living with an elk herd sounds like a great only-in-Wyoming story.
And as the story has gone viral with video of Diesel just chilling with his elk buddies, people on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and just about any other social media platform are reporting he’s a Wyoming donkey.
Only he’s not, and neither is the elk herd that’s adopted him.
It all happened in California.
“I’m not sure how it turned into a ‘Wyoming story,’” Terrie Drewry of Auburn, California, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.
She and her husband David adopted Diesel in 2018. But the donkey, which grew up wild in Nevada, took off the next year.
Fast-forward five years to this spring, a hunter named Max Fennell with a popular Inaragram account captured video of Diesel with a group of elk, and the story went viral.
Drewry said she doesn’t know when or exactly how the rumor got started that it all went down in Wyoming, or that Diesel was from Wyoming, or that the story every had any connection whatsoever to Wyoming.
Her best guess is that Photoshop or artificial intelligence got into the mix at some point.
“I think somebody posted an AI image of a donkey with some elk saying, ‘There’s a donkey living with elk in Wyoming,’ and that’s how the whole Wyoming rumor got started,” she said.
BLM Adoption
The Drewrys came by Diesel through a Bureau of Land Management burro adoption.
Just as with mustangs in Wyoming, there is ongoing controversy whether herds of donkeys or burros running loose in the southwest part of the state are truly wild, or feral.
Both species are protected under the Federal Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971 and managed by the BLM.
The BLM does occasional roundups of both species under the premise of population control. Wild horse and burro advocate groups claim the roundups are cruel and unnecessary.
Some of the mustangs and burros that the BLM captures are put up for adoption.
Drewry said that to her knowledge, Diesel came from a remote part of Nevada.
She and her husband keep donkeys, which they use as pack animals, and they hoped Diesel would fit in at their place.
But when he was startled by a mountain lion during an outing in 2019 and ran, Diesel kept going, apparently deciding he wanted to live wild again.
After a long search turned up nothing, his former owners were sure that Diesel had died or been killed, perhaps falling prey to a mountain lion.
But in April, a turkey hunter got video footage of a donkey with a group of elk, acting as one of them, and showed it to Drewry. She identified the donkey as Diesel.
‘He’s An Alpha In That Herd’
Diesel seems to be thriving with the elk, Drewry said, even taking a leadership role.
“He’s clearly an alpha (in the) herd,” she said. “I got a random call from some guy yesterday, who told me he saw Diesel standing with two bull elk, and they were protecting that herd.”
Folks from Wyoming who view the video of Diesel with the elk might think that either the donkey is exceptionally large or the elk are unusually small.
It’s both, Drewery said.
“Diesel is larger than the average donkey,” she said.
And the herd he’s running with are Tule elk, she added. That’s a different, smaller species than the Rocky Mountain elk that live in Wyoming.
Mountain Lion Slayer
Diesel has also been handling predator control duty for his new herd.
Drewery said he’s evidently killed numerous coyotes, and it’s likely he even took out a mountain lion, turning the tables on the big cat species that had scared him away from his owners in the first place.
“A game warden found a mountain lion that had been killed ‘by a hooved animal’ in that area,” she said.
That’s entirely possible, said Matt Barnes, a Colorado range scientist who has worked on wolf and grizzly bear conflict mitigation on ranches in Wyoming and Montana.
In the wild, mountain lions are a primary predator of burros, so fighting them would be a vital life skill for a donkey, he told Cowboy State Daily.
Moreover, donkeys are sometimes used as livestock guardian animals, he said.
Although most people use dogs to guard their flocks from coyotes, wolves, mountain lions and the like, donkeys with a particularly bold temperament can be up to the task as well, Barnes said.
So it’s not surprising to hear that Diesel has taken up the role of protector among the elk, he said.
“There’s definitely been cases of donkeys or burros actually killing mountain lions. It’s rare, but it has happened,” Barnes said.
Drewry said she and David have decided not to try recovering Diesel.
He seems to be “living his best life” out among the elk, and the Drewrys are fine with that, she said.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to properly credit the hunter who captured the video of Diesel, Max Fennell, who posted the video to his Instagram account, @MaxFennell.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
