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Bollywood star Salman Khan has come under attack from animal rights group PETA India for featuring a donkey named Max on the sets of the serial, Bigg Boss.
In a letter, PETA India Advocacy Associate Shaurya Agrawal wrote, “Bigg Boss is light-hearted entertainment, but the use of animals on a show set is no laughing matter. As prey animals, donkeys are naturally nervous. They, and other animals, would find the lights, sounds and clamour that is standard on all show sets confusing and frightening. That a show set is no place for an animal is obvious to viewers who are saddened to see the donkey kept in a small, confined space standing in waste.”
Max’s finding a place at the Bigg Boss house is only the latest in the complex relationship between humans and donkeys (Equus asinus), one that has been in existence since humans first domesticated the animal 7,000 years ago.
Michael Gross notes it best in A brief history of donkeys published in October 2022 in Current Biology:
Donkeys, says Gross, also appear in ancient hieroglyphs, in Aesop’s fables, the Quran, in Don Quixote and in numerous other cultural products through to children’s books and nursery rhymes.
But while children relate to the long-eared cuteness of the animal, grown-up perceptions are often highlighting negative traits such as stubborn fearfulness in the saying “lions led by donkeys”, he adds.
This mixed bag of an image that the donkey carries — gentle but stubborn, cute but stupid — is unique in a way.
Perhaps the best answer to this is English author Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s landmark poem, The Donkey. As per tradition, Jesus entered the holy city of Jerusalem riding a donkey on Palm Sunday. The animal also finds several other mentions in the Bible, notably in the story of Balaam’s Donkey Speaks.
But coming back to Chesterton’s poem, as Gross puts it, “The Bible mentions Jesus riding on a donkey, fulfilling a prophecy that simultaneously marks him as the promised king and as an ally of the common people. This is just one of twenty cameo appearances that the traditional beast of burden makes in Christianity’s Holy Scriptures.”
As one notable stanza of Chesterton’s work reads:
Today, the world’s donkeys face an even greater danger to their existence. Ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine, produced from collagen extracted from donkey skin, has already decimated donkey populations in a number of regions.
This old and gentle friend of humanity could very well vanish this time. If not for anything else, we owe it to the donkey for the times that both species have spent together on this planet, with the humble beast faithfully carrying our burden. Maybe the makers of Big Boss and Salman Khan could do well to keep this in mind. Far from strengthening negative stereotypes, they should do their bit in removing them.
