2. The Batty Ass

THE PIEBALD or skewbald ass has not made its appearance in Ireland until fairly recent years, and until breeding records are kept for a period it is difficult to assess which colours blend together to produce certain results. From my limited experience I have found that white is the primary colour in piebald or skewbald breeding, and because of this I wonder if only in recent years have African and Asiatic asses ceased to meet as wayfarers and settled down long enough to produce, over the generations, broken-coloured progeny.

That there have been numerous stone and mousey-grey asses in these isles for many years is an accepted fact, and it is interesting to read in Life at the Zoo by C.J. Cornish (1894) that, in the Southern Forest (New Forest) there are many hundreds of semi-wild donkeys, as well as ponies, which are left to nature from year to year. The ponies are of every colour known in the annals of horse breeding, but the shaggy little donkeys are all of a uniform dark stone colour that never varies. He continues,

Incidentally, looking at the beautiful wild asses from the Desert of Cutch [India], Southern Africa and Central Asia, which are exhibited at the zoo, one is tempted to wonder how it comes that the race in this country has been allowed to degenerate, instead of being retained as a strong and useful auxiliary to our unrivalled breed of horses.

With the information that these dark stone-grey donkeys remained the same colours when kept isolated over a period, I turned in other directions. It had always been of great interest to me why broken-coloured animals, including horses and cattle, around parts of the west of Ireland are referred to as 'batty', and after the arrival of our first broken-coloured donkeys, when the locals asked to see the 'batty asses', I decided to try to find the origin of the word. After fruitless enquiries around the country, I searched through books to see if there was any breed of these animals that might suggest such a name, and eventually the word 'Battak' appeared as the name of a Sumatra pony in a book printed in 1905. According to this book these ponies were bred in the Battak range of hills in Sumatra and were a regular export to Singapore, being on average 11.3 hands high and of many colours, with piebalds and skewbalds in the majority. The pure white were highly thought of and reserved exclusively for ownership by the local chieftains.

Could it be that some voyager had imported Battak ponies to these parts at some time and so provided us with the derivative word of 'batty' for all our broken-coloured stock? An exciting and not improbable thought! Continuing, I found that 'the original colour of the unimproved Battak ponies is said to have been mouse-grey, with a black stripe down the back', before the introduction of Arab blood. The main reason for cross-breeding was that all neighbouring and local princes, sultans, and chieftains coveted the pure white, red-eyed (albino) ponies, without any markings. These ponies could not be purchased by anyone other than the chiefs of the district, and the introduction of Arab blood, apart from changing their original colour, was to combine 'the fire and beauty of the Son of the Desert with the hardiness and endurance of the Battak pony'.

The Arab equine strain comprises many colours, including whites, greys, bays, chestnuts, browns, and blacks. These, when crossed with the original mousey-grey colour of the Battak ponies, seem to have produced the piebalds, skewbalds and roans, as well as introducing their own colourings. The occasional white, being so greatly prized, must have been crossed with a large variety of other colours in an effort to obtain and maintain a pure white strain, thereby throwing broken colours indiscriminately. Since these ponies in their original state seem to have been of a similar colour to the African ass, surely one has grounds for assuming that likewise the various ass colours have been produced in spite of the reverse of the African and Asiatic species-it will be remembered from the previous chapter that the African ass was, broadly speaking, of mouse-grey shades with a black dorsal stripe, and the Asiatic ass white, chestnut and bay brown. Supposing this assumption to be correct, one wonders why these broken colours have appeared only in recent years; it seems unbelievable that they have not met and bred before.

If the Battak ponies appeared as broken-coloured as a result of crossing white Arabs with the original mouse-grey, black dorsal-striped stock in an effort to produce the pure white breed so highly prized by their chieftains, could it not be possible that crossing white asses with mousey or stone-grey ones would also produce broken colours? If so, the reason why this has taken so long to come about is that it is the sort of thing that only happens when selection of animals for mating is deliberately made over a period of time, and if it is accepted that white is a primary colour, one could hazard a guess as to the delay, in Ireland anyway, of producing piebalds.

White has never been a very popular colour in Ireland with cattle because they were less able to stand up to the rigours of the Irish climate, more susceptible to vermin, and subject to a complaint called 'white heifer disease', which caused them either to abort or to fail to conceive. Since the ass was owned chiefly by country people, the prejudice against the white cow can be assumed to have extended to the white ass, so that the white asses, like white cattle, were most probably gelded if males and seldom bred from if females.

In the ancestry of any broken-coloured asses that I have knowledge of, there has always been a white parent or ancestor, and the more white forebears there are in the lineage, the more likelihood of getting broken colours, so perhaps in earlier days the first white donkey to breed with our mousey-coloured asses produced foals that took completely after one parent or another. Once these two colours were in the strain, subsequent generations produced broken-coloured progeny, and the intervention of any other colour just added to the mixture. It is interesting to note that just as yellowish patches sometimes appeared on one species of onager (wild Asiatic ass), so this same yellowish colour appears in many broken-coloured asses today.

The first broken-coloured donkey I saw in Ireland was in Adare, County Limerick. He was bought from a well-known circus by the 6th Earl of Dunraven in 1950 for £40, which was then considered a very high price for a donkey. He was a beautifully marked gelding called Mr Buttons.

Another point of interest is the absence of black in the colourings of wild asses, except in their stripings, because this colour is certainly prevalent in our 'mixed-up' ass of today. It could be due to instances of melanism, or an excess of colouring matter in the skin, rather than colour gradation, or it may have been that the North African (Libyan) wild ass was black before either the African or Asiatic species added their strain to turn it into the dark brown colour now found so often in Europe, especially in Spain. That it appeared earlier than its piebald or skewbald relations is beyond doubt. The chestnut colour seems to have been imported here about 1906 from Egypt, and from it (or them) have sprung the relatively few chestnuts to be found at present in Ireland.

The hooves seem to be the first part of the animal to show signs of colour changes, and on our stud I noticed that broken-coloured donkeys had either broken-coloured hooves, white hooves, or a mixture of each, and never four black ones. On white donkeys I have seen either all black, all white, or broken-colours. An ordinary coloured, mouse-grey foal born to us one season by a skewbald sire out of a mid-brown mare had all broken-coloured hooves. With regard to the chestnuts, one mare called Rowan, who was by a chestnut sire out of a mouse-grey mare, had very pale hooves, while a chestnut yearling colt named Ard Ri, by a chestnut sire out of a cinnamon-coloured mare called Cinnamon, had deep chestnut hooves. It is notable that this colt also had deep chestnut-coloured skin surrounding his eyes, while the mare's was pink in the same area. A broken-coloured filly foal had one eye surrounded by black skin, the other by pink skin! She was by a piebald sire out of a grey-brown mare. Some donkeys at the stud had very pronounced leg markings, as on the African wild asses, though these markings came on mouse-greys, mid-brown, and dark brown-coloured animals. There are many other interesting individual differences of appearance, such as stiff manes, bifurcating shoulder stripes and colour spots. Surely colour characteristics appear and disappear according to cross-breeding: Darwin's theory of 'colour being but a fleeting characteristic' cannot be applicable to our ass family. The colour changes must be the result of the cross-breeding itself, according to the Mendelian theory of heredity.

Donkeys have been crossed with zebras and the offspring show many different markings. I have seen a photograph of a young zebrass, the foal of a zebra sire and donkey mare. It had a plain body, except for the dorsal stripe and cross, with legs and ears striped like a zebra. When...