Donkeys’ day out : Two lost babies’ found after massive search

Recalling the night they went missing, president-worker Rita Kaul said: “It was close to midnight when the last volunteer, who comes in to feed the monkeys, saw the two babies. Next morning, when everybody walked in, they were gone. So, sometime between midnight and morning, the two donkeys wandered off.”

The hunt began immediately. The Frendicoes staff fanned out, checked every nook and corner, stopped strangers and asked them if they had seen “two little lostdonkeys”. At the end of the day, all they knew was that a cobbler had seen the donkeys on Lodhi Road.

Missing posters were promptly put up in South Delhi colonies and markets. “Two white baby donkeys missing from Frendicoes S E C A,” they screamed. “One, the size of a dog, the other slightly larger. They were last seen together on Lodhi Road on July 29. If you see these two little lost donkeys, please call immediately…” No other identification marks were given.

Frendicoes volunteers were distressed. They had hunted high and low for the babies, with no luck. Even the complaint they lodged at the Defence Colony police station yielded no results. They were still missing on day two.

The donkeys are new additions to the Frendicoes family. Sheeba joined the Frendicoes family when she was one-day-old. The organisation received a call one January morning, informing them that a donkey had died in an accident and left behind a baby girl. They christened the “poor little baby” Sheeba and in a matter ofdays became her surrogate mother.

In June, Frendicoes was contacted again. There was another abandoned baby donkey on the streets of Delhi. Ashu joined the family and hit it off with Sheeba. Baby calf Nandi completed the happy trio.

While Frendicoes mourned the loss of the two donkeys, Maneka Gandhi’s sister, Ambica Shukla was driving through Jor Bagh. And right there, near the turn to Jor Bagh market, she spotted them.

“It was Saturday, I think. I drove back to my house and brought the van,” Shukla recounts. “First I put the smaller donkey in, but the bigger one (Sheeba) refused to follow suit. In fact, she was most distressed that the smaller donkey was in the van. So then, I took out the smaller donkey and just walked them both to my house.”

Making the two comfortable in the park in front of her house, Shukla made a call to her sister’s organisation, the Sanjay Gandhi Animal Care Centre. “I called for an ambulance,” she says. “Till it came, the two animals were grazing in the park.”

Kaulsays: “We had no idea they were in the other shelter. Actually, we didn’t expect anybody else to pick them up, because in this area we do all the picking up. So we didn’t check with them.”

This morning, Shukla gave Frendicoes member Gita Seshmani a call. The two got chatting and Shukla mentioned the donkeys. Everything suddenly fell into place and by evening, Ashu and Sheeba were back home.

“They trotted towards us the minute the saw us,” Kaul says,“We were so happy to see them and they were so happy to be back home.”