Meet the herd

Tommy arrived before there was a Jarjeer for him to arrive at. Our founders, Sue and Charles, had retired to Morocco from the law, and in 2011 another animal charity asked whether they would take on an orphaned donkey who had grown difficult to handle and whom nobody had managed to settle. Within a few years there were twelve. Rather than keep them as pets, Sue founded a refuge, and it opened in 2014.

We asked the head of the veterinary service at Liverpool University what to do with him. The advice was not what anyone expected: find him a very strong female. That was Baida, who knocked him firmly into shape. He was castrated soon afterwards, and the donkey nobody could manage settled quietly into the herd.

For a long while he had a stable to himself. That stable is the teashop kitchen now. More than three hundred animals have been given a home here since, and Tommy has watched every one of them arrive.

He has also been the voice of this place for most of a decade — complaining about the standard of service with a bucket in his mouth, turning up for attention on a morning when nobody asked him to, and once thanking three thousand people personally for following him. A great many people who support Jarjeer first heard about it from a donkey.

He was here before the beginning. Everything since has happened around him.

Halima spent her days in Meknes tied up in the street under an enormous decorated saddle, so that tourists could be photographed beside her, or sit on her back. All day, every day, in the heat, on the cobbles. She was also heavily pregnant, and nobody had thought that worth mentioning.

Somebody filmed her and put it online, and this time the internet did what it very rarely does: it stayed angry long enough to matter. Millions of people watched. We negotiated with her owner, arrangements were made, and he found a driver to bring her the six hours south to us.

At two o’clock in the morning, somewhere on that road, she started to foal. The driver pulled over onto the verge and telephoned Jarjeer, and Ayoub, who manages the refuge, stayed on the line with him in the dark and talked him through everything that needed doing. An hour later there was a healthy foal standing at the side of the road, halfway between the old life and this one, and the two of them finished the journey together.

They reached us to a stable banked deep in straw. A few days later we walked her out onto the green. She was nervous of it — she had never in her life stood on grass and did not know what her feet were telling her. Then she put her head down, and her baby copied her.

Marjana was born on a verge at two o’clock in the morning, somewhere on the six-hour road between Meknes and Marrakech, while a lorry driver knelt beside her mother with a telephone pressed to his ear and Ayoub on the other end of it.

That driver had been hired to move an animal. What he did instead was pull over in the dark, deliver a foal at the side of a road, and then give her a name: Marjana, a jewel, for the white diamond on her forehead. Then he drove them both the rest of the way to us.

She has never been tied up, never worn a saddle, and never stood in a street with a stranger on her back. She has no idea that any of this is unusual, which is exactly as it should be.

She is growing up here alongside her mother, and the mark she was named for is still the first thing anybody notices about her.

Stella spent her working life on Imouane beach, saddled and tied to a stake in the sand, carrying children up and down in the heat. Every hand she knew came with a job attached.

Her freedom was paid for by supporters in five days, with people in four countries giving within the first twenty four hours. The rescue itself was seen through step by step by Agnieszka Klech, an expert horsewoman and farrier who has spent years fighting for the animals of that coast, and to whom Jarjeer owes more than this one rescue.

She came off the truck at three o’clock in the afternoon, stood for a moment, and then went where she was led without any fuss at all. She had been led her whole life. The only thing that changed that day was where to.

She is very old, with a cataract in one eye, and she is still deciding about people. She keeps a polite distance, and nobody here blames her one bit. Trust will arrive on her clock, not ours. In the meantime the hay arrives, the water stays full, and nothing is asked of her at all.

Birdie is an older pony, and she keeps her own company. She is polite about it: she simply prefers the edge of things, where she can see everybody and nobody is breathing on her hay.

Then Stella arrived, straight off the beach at Imouane, knowing nobody. Birdie decided the new pony was worth knowing, and has been showing her around. They seem, in the quietest way, to be friends.

We do not know much about Birdie’s life before here, and she is not telling. What matters is how it goes from now on: no work, no pressure, and a friend of her own choosing.

Lucky went down in a Marrakech street, still harnessed to the cart she was pulling, after a car door swung open onto it and took her legs from under her. Somebody watching wrote to us. Nobody had thought to unhitch the cart before hauling at her, and a crowd had gathered to force water down her throat — people meaning well, doing harm.

Ayoub drove down for her with a bed of straw already laid in the back of the truck. She still had a rope hobble round her fetlock when he got there. She walked up into it herself. As they pulled away, a white carriage horse stood at the kerb in full harness, waiting for a fare.

She came down the ramp here in the afternoon, in her own time, and drank a bucket of water without stopping. Then Ayoub cleaned and dressed her leg while another of our carers stood at her head and fed her out of a bowl, and she never moved — two strangers working on her, and she stood and let them.

She is thin, and her back carries the pale scars of a lifetime under a harness, healed over long ago and never once noticed. She has worked every day of her life. She will not work again.

Her knee took the worst of the fall and we are told it will come right. Her tongue is a different matter. It hangs from her mouth and always will — the old traditional bits damage the muscles and the teeth, and years of one leave a mule unable to hold her own tongue in. So she is fed soft food, so that we can be sure she is getting her protein, and she eats it well.

She is already out in the hospital paddock with the others, which is sooner than we expected, and she seems perfectly content in their company.

They have called her Lucky. Given the life she has had, that takes some explaining. But look where she is standing.

Laurel is the white one. He and Hardy were harnessed together on the caleches in Marrakech, and they came out of the square together on 3 June 2021, both of them starving.

He carries a long scar down his side. It is the kind of mark a vehicle leaves, and he was still working with it.

In March 2022 Ellen Cochrane came out from the United Kingdom, and on the first morning she ever met him she worked with him at liberty, no rope, no bit, nothing but her own patience. He had spent years being told what to do by a whip and a tight rein. Nobody had asked him anything before.

He is out in the big field now with the others, and the only thing anybody asks of him is that he comes over when he feels like it.

Hardy pulled a caleche around Marrakech. He and Laurel were harnessed together, hauling tourists through the traffic in the heat, and both of them were close to starvation while they did it. You can see his ribs through the harness in the photograph below. That was taken on the day we bought him.

They arrived here on 3 June 2021. For the first few days we kept them in holding stables with a small yard, because the floors are earth and they were still shod, and a horse in that condition slipping over is a horse you lose. On the eighth they had their first bath. On the twelfth they walked into a stable that had been built for them.

We were told, by people who knew what they were talking about, that a caleche horse could never be rehabilitated. That a life spent between the shafts on a tight bit does something to a horse that does not come undone.

Ayoub has spent four years proving otherwise, without a bit and without a stick. In November 2024 he rode Hardy out along the lane in the morning, and there is no part of that sentence anybody would have believed in 2021.

Gladiator spent his working life in the film industry at Ouarzazate, where a good deal of what the world pictures when it pictures Morocco is actually filmed. When he grew too old for the work, the plan was to send him to the butcher.

Local people heard what was intended and told us. He arrived here on 15 January 2025.

He came in boisterous and reared a great deal, which is precisely what the work had trained him to do. He was gelded a few weeks later and turned out with the stallion herd, and the note made here that day was simply: this is true freedom.

He had been ridden on a bit his whole working life. That June, Ellen Cochrane came over from England, where she works with muleteers in the mountains and argues against them, and she got onto him the first time she ever met him without one. There are no bits at Jarjeer.

He was too old to be useful. He turned out not to be too old for anything else.

Tosca spent her working life as a lead mule in Imlil, high in the Atlas. She first came to us during the pandemic for medical treatment. She had an excellent owner, was always worked without a bit — just a head collar — and she knew every one of the mountain passes, which is why she was the one who led the other mules.

In 2021 we heard that her owner needed a younger mule, and that to buy one he had been made to give Tosca up in part exchange. We found her in Agadir, pulling a cart and very depressed. After a great deal of negotiation with her new owner, and with the police along the way, we were able to bring her home to Jarjeer.

She lives up with the horses now, though we can let her out whenever she likes. She wanders the whole estate, comes down most days to see the donkeys, and finds her own way back at teatime.

Julie arrived one evening in November 2017, and it took several men to carry her in. She had been down for a long time. Her owner, a man called Joseph, had asked whether we would take her, because he had no way of keeping her comfortable himself. Sue wrote at the time that this was a huge step forward, because historically a donkey in that condition would simply have been abandoned.

The injury was in her neck. Normally it would have meant putting her down, and the veterinary prognosis was against her, but we tried the alternatives instead: a hoist slung from the stable ceiling, lowered again each night, and massage with hot oil, turmeric and ginger. Mohamed, Ayoub and Brahim did it every day for months.

On the morning of 3 January 2018 a message came from Ayoub in the stables. It said, we have succeeded. She had got to her feet on her own for the first time. It was four months before she could stand all day, and she did not walk out of that stable until the following June.

And then the shock. In April, with her still recovering, we found she was pregnant, from before the injury and before she ever came to us. On 25 June 2018 she gave birth to a strong, healthy foal. We called her Aurora.

The stable she was treated in is called Jonathan’s stable. Four generations of her family have now been born at Jarjeer.

Aurora was born on 25 June 2018, in the stable where her mother had spent seven months learning to stand again. Nobody had expected her at all.

We had been afraid she would not survive. Julie had been on a great deal of medication and strapped into a hoist around her middle for months on end. She was born strong and healthy anyway.

Ayoub and Mohamed, who had nursed Julie every single day, arrived for work that morning and found the foal already there. A few days later Ayoub gave Aurora his own St Francis medal to hang in the refuge.

She grew up among the staff and the visitors, helping Touffik refurbish the clinic stables and, in Sue’s words, utterly spoilt. She and Julie later took in an injured young donkey called Arthur and shared their stable with him.

Hope was born here on 23 September 2023, two weeks after the earthquake. On the same day, an old donkey also called Hope, who had been found tied to the fencing around the airport and had spent a lovely retirement here sharing a stable with Tosca, her best friend, died. The foal was given her name, in memory of the loss and of everything that had happened in those two weeks.

Her family goes back further than almost anything else at Jarjeer. Her grandmother Julie arrived one evening in November 2017, so badly injured in the neck that she could not stand. Her owner had asked us to take her, which Sue called a huge step forward, because historically a donkey in that state would simply have been abandoned. We nursed her for six months in a sling hung from the ceiling. Against all veterinary prognosis, as Sue wrote at the time, she stood. Then came the shock: nobody had known she was pregnant. The foal that Ayoub and Mohamed found standing beside her when they arrived for work one June morning was Aurora. Aurora grew up and, in September 2023, had Hope.

And on a beautiful sunny morning in August 2026, Hope had a foal of her own. We called the baby Sunny, for the morning she arrived on. Another girl, and, as Sue put it, a strong female gene in that family.

Four generations have now been born at Jarjeer, every one of them beginning with a donkey who was carried in and would not give up.

Sunny arrived on the morning of 15 August 2026 and had her name before the day was out. She was born on a beautiful sunny morning, and she is doing really well.

She is the newest of a remarkable line. Her great-grandmother Julie arrived one evening in November 2017, unable to stand after an injury to her neck. She stood again six months later, and gave birth to Aurora. Aurora had Hope. And Hope, on that sunny morning, had her.

She will never know the life her great-great-grandmother came from. She was born onto deep straw with four generations of her family’s story already behind her, and the whole of the refuge ahead.

Bruce was abandoned in Beni Mellal and reached us at midnight on 14 August 2026, at the end of a long road and a good deal of work by a lot of people.

One of his front legs was broken a long time ago. Nobody treated it, so it healed as best it could on its own and left the hoof turned inwards — an injury he has been walking on, by the look of it, for years. The other leg has a deep wound of the kind left by something tied too tightly and then forgotten about. He is thin enough that you can count him.

He was abandoned because he could no longer work. That is very nearly always the reason.

Ayoub has been treating both legs every day since he arrived, and will be for a good while yet. Three days in, he walked out into the yard in the afternoon sun, and the other donkeys came over to find out who he was. He is not sound and he is not going to be. He does not need to be.

Bruce will live out the rest of his life here. He will not be worked again, and no animal is tethered at Jarjeer.

A young Moroccan woman came out of the veterinary clinic in Targa one morning and found a donkey harnessed to a cart of rubbish at the side of the road. The donkey was thin, there was an open wound where the harness sat, and her owner was lying unconscious on the verge.

She telephoned Sue, and then she stayed on the line. Ayoub was forty minutes away. In those forty minutes Sue talked her through getting the donkey out of the cart, and a group of young people gathered on the pavement, unhitched her, pulled up handfuls of grass to feed her, and stood around her. When her owner came round and went to take her back, they would not let him. Then they called the police.

The policeman let Ayoub load her onto the truck and asked him to wait for officers coming from Marrakech. They thanked us for taking her. Her owner was arrested.

She travelled home on fresh straw. Ayoub, who had driven down for her that morning, cleaned the wound the harness had made — gloved, crouched in the yard, taking as long over it as it needed and no less. Then she went into a stable banked deep in straw, with a rug over her back, and put her head into a bowl of feed and did not take it out again.

The young woman who made that telephone call is the one who named her Venus. She has written to us ever since, and she still sends what she can.

Trigger was abandoned on an industrial estate in Marrakech and left there for fifteen days. Somebody filmed him and put it online, and the video did what those videos do — hundreds of people demanding that something be done about it.

We went and got him. He arrived thin and mentally fragile, too unsure of himself for the mule field, so he went into the main paddock with the disabled donkeys instead and learned there how to be around other animals. Within days he was letting people stroke him.

Then somebody suggested raising the money to buy him a cup of coffee, which is how Trigger came to be the only mule here with a documented coffee habit. He cannot drink a whole one. He shares.

Polly was a few days old when wild dogs killed her mother. They turned on her too, and the whole of her side was torn open. She was found north-east of Casablanca and came to us with the wounds still fresh.

The team bottle-fed her, all day, for months. She still gets one occasionally, as a treat, long past needing it.

In the next stable was PeeWee, a donkey foal who had arrived the same way and the same week — her mother killed by the same kind of pack, one of her hooves lost to them. The two of them grew up together and were, by every account, spoilt rotten.

In April this year Halima, who came here from a square in Meknes and was frightened of every other animal at the refuge, made her first friend. It was Polly.

If you look at her side you can still see where it healed.

PeeWee was a few days old when wild dogs killed her mother. They turned on her too, and she lost a hoof.

She came to us from north of Casablanca and was bottle-fed here, all day, for months. In the next stable was Polly, a foal who had arrived the same way and the same week. The two of them shared a stable and grew up together.

PeeWee grew a new hoof. It will never be quite right and she will always be a little disabled, and none of that has made the slightest difference to her: when the herd goes out she is the straggler at the back, and she refuses to be left behind.

At Christmas that year the two of them were jointly appointed Jarjeer’s advocates for the rights of equines across Morocco. They have held the post ever since, without complaint, and with no measurable output beyond being alive — which was rather the point.

Daisy has no dramatic story, and here that is a kind of luxury. Most of the herd arrived from somewhere hard. Daisy is just Daisy: a quiet, ordinary donkey living a quiet, ordinary life, which is exactly what this place exists to make possible.

She keeps to the middle of the herd and out of most photographs. It took us until tagging week to get a proper portrait of her.

Ordinary does not mean unimportant. The quiet ones hold a herd together.

Hero came to us in May 2018. Some children had put a plastic bag over his head and set light to it. His ears did not survive it.

Simo drove up to fetch him from the north of the country. When they got back you could still smell the burning.

We asked people to suggest a name for him and there were so many that in the end it went to a draw. The name that came out was Hero, which seemed about right after everything he had been through.

He woke up on his first morning here to what was, in all likelihood, the best breakfast of his life: our own mix of tibben, bran and sugar beet.

He has been part of the herd ever since — and, by every account, a considerable character.