Cruiser's Story

Our little red mini donkey

There's a particular kind of gut drop that comes with buying an animal you've got plans for, and then having those plans upended within weeks.

That's what happened with Cruiser.

We brought him home as a stud jack, a handsome red boy with the kind of quiet, sturdy presence you want in a breeding donkey. He started romancing the girls and we had ideas for him. A future mapped out. And then, about a couple of weeks in, we noticed something on his muzzle. Small at first. The sort of thing you watch for a few days before deciding what it is.

Our first guess was wondering if it was an injury from the twitch the farrier may have used on his lip while doing his feet, before he'd even come home to us. We had no idea but that seemed the simplest explanation, so that's what we went with for a while.

When it didn't settle, we took him to our local vet, who had a different theory: ringworm. We came home with cream and instructions to wait and see.

We waited. It didn't get better. If anything, it got worse, what had started as two tiny bumps grew fast over the following weeks, and the largest became ulcerated and would occasionally bleed.

That's when we found Golden Plains Equine, a specialist clinic 200km away (400km round trip), so a proper day's commitment every time we made the trip. It was there that Cruiser was finally examined properly.

By then there were four separate lumps on his muzzle. A biopsy of the largest came back with a diagnosis none of us had been expecting: an undifferentiated pleomorphic soft tissue sarcoma. In plain terms, an aggressive skin cancer, one that invades the surrounding tissue and can spread if left alone. We'd never heard of it happening in a donkey before and we devastated.

The vet laid out the options. Surgery to debulk what could be removed, followed by chemotherapy injections directly into the site. Chemotherapy alone, without surgery. Doing nothing and simply watching. Or the other option nobody wants to say out loud.

For us, it wasn't really a decision at all. Every animal who comes to Rosehaven gets a genuine chance at a quality life, no matter what turns up along the way. So we went straight to surgery, followed by cisplatin.

The road wasn't short. There was the surgery itself, then the waiting for the wound to heal, then the trips back to the clinic for the chemotherapy rounds injected straight into where the tumours had been. There were no guarantees along the way, the vet had been upfront that recurrence risk was real, and that ongoing vigilance for new lumps would be part of life with Cruiser from here on.

But he came through it.

Before we knew he had cancer, that initial romance period, resulted in our beautiful Tommy, who many of you following along already know and love. Cruiser has since been gelded, closing the door on any further breeding.

These days, Cruiser is still right here with us. Rosehaven is his forever home, and he's settled, cared for. He is now in remission, and he goes for regular check ups, he is as far as a donkey ever lets you know, content.

We think about that whole stretch often. The twitch theory, the ringworm cream, the drive to Golden Plains and back. How something so easy to misread the first few times turned out to be so serious underneath. We didn't end up with the stud donkey we thought we were bringing home. We got a handsome red donkey with a story of his own, a foal named Tommy carrying his line forward, and a permanent reminder of why we do things the way we do.

If you'd like to hear more about Tommy, Cruiser the rest of the herd, subscribe and keep an eye out for future posts from the farmyard.