TLS General Newsletter
APRIL 2026

Hi Dorothea,

We are excited to bring you this month’s TLS general newsletter. Your interest in our work is essential to our mission, and we are grateful for your ongoing support and commitment.

A Message from our Executive Director

Welcome to our April 2026 General Newsletter! Spring has sprung, and our event season of the year started with our annual Lazy Sunday Donkey Hike on April 12. We'll share more about that below, but first, a heads-up: Did you know you can support us when you go grocery shopping? Yes, you can help us simply by shopping at Smith's with a Smith's rewards card!

Here is how it works: Create a Smith's Food & Drug account and get a rewards card. Once you log in, you can search for the name "The Longears Safehouse" or for number LS051, then click Enroll. Then, when you go shopping, you can either swipe your registered Smith's Food & Drug rewards card or use the phone number associated with your account. What a great way to help us put hay into our feeders!

-Dorothea

Lazy Sunday Donkey Hike

We had a great turnout at the Lazy Sunday Donkey Hike: Around 25 people and 11 donkeys (five more than last year!) We’re so grateful to Joyce Davis and Annarie Radler for hosting the hike, planning the trail route, and preparing tea and cookies afterward. Three of our adoptees from last year participated (Esther, Katerina, and Nico). We heard that the human participants were grateful for the opportunity to take their donkeys out on a trail for the first time in a safe, stress-free setting. Little Katerina (formerly Emma) mastered crossing a white line on the road, and our Chloe and Abigail learned a lot, too. The two girls are up for adoption. Learn more about Chloe and Abigail. We are considering hosting more of these hiking events in the future to give our adopters and others more opportunities to familiarize their donkeys with hiking trails and to have playdates with other donkeys—let us know if that's something you'd like to see!

A New Mural?

Calling all artists: We have a small cement wall with a window in our new pen, and it needs a mural! It is not in the most prominent place, but it will greatly enrich one of the back and corner areas of our ranch and brighten the day for volunteers and visitors who take a ranch tour. If you are an acrylic painter, would you donate a mural to us? Of course, every artist who contributes to our space will be featured. We appreciate a broad range of styles and love bright colors. Our other current murals were donated by Don Bremner of Albuquerque; they’re a lovely addition to our visuals and brighten up our space, especially during grey and white winter days.

Upcoming Events

May Event: Turquoise Trail Pack Burro Race & Art in the Park

When: May 2 (Saturday) from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Where: Village of Cerrillos

What: We will be in Cerrillos during the Turquoise Trail pack burro races. We are not participating in the races, but you can find our table at Art in the Park near the Cerrillos Visitor Center! We will have info material, discounted merchandise, and time for a chat about our work.

──────────────────

May Event: Camino de los Burros

When: May 10 (Sunday). Parade participants must arrive at 9 a.m. The parade will run from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Where: Downtown Santa Fe, parade beginning in the parking lot next to St. Francis Cathedral

What: We will be participating in the annual Camino de los Burros, a walk with donkeys through downtown Santa Fe to commemorate the contributions donkeys made to the city in the 18th century. We can still use more participants/donkey handlers, with or without their own donkeys, in (sort of) 18th-century attire. The attire does not have to be super authentic – see below some of the dress choices from last year! We’re currently planning to bring Jackson and Pablo, and may bring Jessie, Chloe, and Abigail, depending on space and the number of volunteers we get.

Please contact Jackie at [email protected] if you’d still like to attend with your donkey

Please contact Dorothea at [email protected] if you'd like to attend with one of the donkeys from Longears Safehouse

──────────────────

Tack and Ranch Yard Sale

When: A weekend in the first half of June

Where: Longears Safehouse

What: We’re planning a tack, ranch, and general yard sale on a weekend in the first half of June, just before the monsoon season is supposed to start. We have a bunch of smaller items that we’d like to sell to raise funds for our operation. We’d like to turn this into a nice, family friendly weekend event – not really a full-fledged open house, but there may be baked goods as well as refreshments for sale as well as brand merchandise, and visitors can meet some of our residents without buying a ticket for a ranch tour. Vendors and artists are also welcome! Anyone who'd like to sell their own merchandise is welcome if they bring their own tables/canopies and pay a $10 fee per space.

We will be selling items such as bridles, saddles, saddle pads or blankets, winter blankets (including donkey-sized ones), water troughs, hot wire accessories, irrigation materials and much more! Please go through your barns, yards, and homes and see if you'd like to get rid of gently used materials or items that you want to donate to our sales event!

If you plan to attend as a vendor, or if you have items to donate, please email [email protected]

Remembering Doc Holiday

We periodically review the outcomes of the donkeys placed through our adoption program. The very first year that we started rescuing and adopting donkeys (2011, before we even got incorporated as a non-profit!), we rescued about 39 donkeys, not counting the babies born later to their pregnant mamas. Nowadays, we no longer take in so many because we already have a barn (or two) full of long ears, but many of the earlier rescue donkeys or their offspring returned to us years later and found new homes through us. One of the first donkeys we rescued and helped was Doc Holiday.

Doc was one of four BLM jacks - we named the rest of the herd Wyatt, Sundance, and Butch - offered on Craigslist as roping donkeys. That means they had already been through at least three separate ordeals. First, they were rounded up in the wild. Their freeze brands indicated they came from a wild herd management area at Clark Mountain, Nevada. Second, their freeze brands also indicated that they had been put up for adoption with the BLM but passed on 3 times. After donkeys are passed on three times, they enter the sale authority program, where burros who don’t get adopted are offered for sale at $25 a head to anyone who will take them. That means they had been shuffled around until someone came along and bought them cheaply for roping practice, which was the start of their third ordeal. Rodeo and other traditional Southwestern public entertainment events typically feature livestock roping competitions in which participants use a lariat to catch and immobilize an animal. Donkeys are often used for this kind of entertainment, either for the competition itself or for practice to prepare participants for roping actual calves at the event. The problem is that roping often leaves scars along the animals’ legs or on their fetlocks, depending on what type of roping they’re subjected to, and it can leave lasting trust issues. As a result of these ordeals, one of the four jacks offered on Craigslist had a broken ear, and two – including Doc - had damaged teeth and scars around their mouths. All of them were very afraid of humans.

The Wild Boys at Intake
From left to right: Doc Holiday, Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and Wyatt Earp

Doc Holiday was the oldest of the four and was also the easiest to work with. Because he had many teeth missing in the front of his mouth, he needed special food to maintain his weight. That’s when we first learned to make mash for senior donkeys. When Doc could be haltered and handled, we got him ready for a new home at TMR Rescue in Texas, where he would live out the remainder of his life. He left for Texas in December 2011. They continued his special mashes, and he was placed in a herd of other old wild jacks who got along well. In 2019, he developed a growth on his leg that wouldn’t heal. He received surgery to remove the mass, but he didn’t recover. We are grateful to TMR Rescue for caring for our boy all those years and providing him with a peaceful environment to live out his days. Two of his original buddies are still alive today: Sundance, the jack with the broken ear, is now in his 20s. He is in sanctuary with us and living a happy life. Butch was adopted out to a home in Taos after rehab. Wyatt, the fourth one, passed in 2023. We will always remember them fondly. Every single donkey or mule we rescue becomes our teacher and takes a piece of our heart.

A picture of Doc Holiday in his later years, graciously provided by TMR Rescue

Sundance is still going strong at 21 years old. Learn more about Sundance.

Contribute to Our Vet and Farrier Fund!

We’re still looking to raise more funds for veterinary care this spring and summer. Veterinary care is the second-largest expense category for us (after feed). Many of the animals coming to us have never received vet care and need extensive exams and treatment to address their health issues. We provide everything from bloodwork or scans to surgery or dental care. We spend around $600 per month on farrier care alone, and several of our older animals require regular medication, which adds up: Treating a single donkey for 2 months of joint pain costs $105, and 2 months of Cushing's costs $190.

While we will always remain primarily an adoption facility, over the years, we have increasingly become a sanctuary for senior donkeys and mules. While veterinary and some farrier care for our adoptables is mostly covered by adoption fees, our sanctuary animals’ needs require us to mobilize other resources.

We also have a few rescue dogs and cats who have important jobs at the ranch: addressing rodent problems and guarding the property. Some of those are on regular medication as well, such as Jane, our old pitbull, and Tommy, a six-year-old cat with chronic heart failure, who plays and enjoys life every day but cannot survive without his meds. Please consider sponsoring one of our older equines, our cats, or our dogs! Every $5 makes a difference, and we rely on public funds – donations and grants – to do the work we do. Our animals thank you for your support!