The other day a lady posted a photo of a soldier with a donkey on his back on Nextdoor in reply to a fairly contentious post.
Side note: Nextdoor has become my guilty pleasure. Sure, sometimes there are informative posts, but mostly it’s a shit show extraordinaire that amuses me to no end. The stuff people post…hilarious! (Well, it’s funny because it’s outrageous what people fight about. But there’s also some good. Mostly it’s the arguments that leave me in stitches, though.)
Anyway, so I was on Nextdoor, this lady posts the donkey photo in response to a man who was arguing, “You all can stay in and stay away from the likes of me who will be out living my life and not falling for this left wing hoax of a quarantine.”
This picture [is] from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was free to wander as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.
I died laughing, but I also was like, “Wait. Is this true? Did WWII soldiers really ever carry donkeys on their backs through potential minefields?”
According to Snopes, nope:
The picture actually dates from 1958, during the Algerian War (i.e., a war for independence waged against French forces in Colonial Algeria). And it depicts a starving donkey that was rescued by a member of the French Foreign Legion who carried it back to his base, where the animal was nursed back to health, given the name “Bambi,” and adopted as a unit mascot — as described by author Douglas Porch in his 1991 history of the Legion…
Damn. I wish it was true, but the moral of the story is still a good one. Just not as good as if the photo had been real.
However, the animal lover in me loves the real story behind the photo perhaps even more.