Recession Deepens; Donkeys Hardest Hit

..no, not the two-legged mooching type, the hard-working four-legged farm worker...

Via Barking Moonbat:

With pastures withered from a lingering drought, farmers in Texas and northwest Louisiana have abandoned donkeys by the hundreds, turning them into wandering refugees that have severely tested animal rescue groups. 

The nation’s biggest donkey rescue group says that since March 2011, it has taken in nearly 800 donkeys abandoned in Texas, where ranchers mainly used the animals to guard their herds. 

“Hay prices still haven’t come down. And what little grass is growing, people are going to save it for the animals that are going to make them money,” he said 

The donkey market has shriveled with the dried-up fields of Texas, where auction houses won’t take them. 

“The last ones we tried to sell, they brought the donkeys back to us. They tried to get a $5 bid for both of them and couldn’t get a $5 bid,” Deputy Bill Pentecost, who wrangles stray livestock for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office north of Austin, said last month. 

The drought, the economy and the high price of hay have forced ranchers across the state to sell off their livestock. Meyers said he’s been paying $290 to $350 a ton for hay, compared to a top price of $90 in normal times, and must send as far as Montana and Minnesota to get it. Even if the weather allows a crop this year, the price isn’t likely to go down immediately, he said. 

...a Claiborne Parish livestock farmer who works on contract for the sheriff’s office, blames U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., for the scores of donkeys he’s taking care of. Landrieu was among sponsors of a measure that shut down the nation’s only horsemeat processing plant by forbidding the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspect such plants.


How does donkey-meat taste? We'll never get to know, since the Democrats have decided to make their processing (and thus, consumption) illegal...

Although, with the price of gas rocketing skyward, and Barack Obama promising to resolve it by...taxing the oil companies to death, maybe we should keep some of these lost donkey around. May wind up being the only way to get to work some day...

And Obama would call that "progress", until a pressure group made donkey-carts illegal, too...