Georgia donkey goes from ‘walking skeleton’ to Guinness record holder

BYRON — A donkey was eating her dinner the other evening at a tiny farm on the outskirts of Macon.

As she chomped timothy hay and oats from a red feed bucket, her ears, ever alert, sprang to attention.

One of the farm dogs, Loki the German shepherd, had barked at something. A squirrel maybe, nothing ominous.

Still, for a moment, the donkey’s ears, furry and brown and longer than bedroom slippers, stood sentry: majestic twin spires.

When they eventually swung low, outstretched at parade rest, they resembled wings, oars even, otherworldly appendages, each of them 15-and-a-half inches long.

No ordinary ears are they.

They’re the longest donkey ears on earth.

‘She was a walking skeleton’

When the donkey’s Middle Georgia owner, Hannah Frost, bought her in September, Frost had no idea the female donkey’s ears were extraordinary.

The animal had come from a farm in Arkansas. But her ears, ample as they may be, were the last thing anyone here noticed.

The roughly 15-year-old American Mammoth Jackstock with a hee-hawing bray that sounded like a sped-up foghorn was in failing health.

She was scrawny, malnourished.

“When she got off the trailer, she looked rough,” Frost, 26, said. “She was a walking skeleton.”

This Macon-area donkey arrived at its new owner Hannah Frost's farm last year in looking malnourished and scrawny. Frost nursed her back to health. (Joe Kovac Jr./AJC)

Frost sensed the animal hadn’t been cared for. The donkey looked nothing like the healthy one Frost had seen in online photographs before buying her.

The donkey had hoof infections. She was anemic with metabolic disorders.

“She was,” said Dr. Julia Smith, the veterinarian who would treat her, “extremely skinny.”

The donkey, whose former owner — a man Frost has since been unable to reach — had dubbed her Matilda.

She could barely stand.

“We just hoped she was gonna live,” said Frost.

At her farm along Deep Creek in southern Crawford County, Frost breeds goats and is raising five other donkeys — Bonnie, Clyde, Belle, Ash and Red Velvet — and a mule named Moose. She has also taken in pigs and nursed sickly sheep back to health.

But in September, alarmed by her new donkey’s serious ailments, Frost called in Smith, the vet.

“It turned into a mercy case,” Frost said.

Smith also doctored the donkey’s teeth, which were in bad shape, making it hard to chew.

When Smith sedated the donkey to do the dental work, its elegant ears flopped limp.

“Her ears,” Smith said to herself, “are about as long as my arm.”

Smith mentioned their unusual length to Frost.

They were whoppers.

The vet said the ears just might be the longest she’d ever seen.

‘She looks like a longhorn’

As the weeks passed, the donkey rallied and Frost renamed her.

The donkey began eating regularly and, by year’s end, put on 100 pounds.

Frost had by then, on a lark, measured the donkey’s ears, each of which were more than 15 inches long.

In October, Frost happened upon a livestock society’s Facebook post about a donkey in Great Britain with 13-inch ears.

That domesticated equine, a Poitou named Bambou, held the Guinness World Record for “Longest Ears on a Living Donkey.” (The Guinness folks, on their website for kids, declared Bambou “ear-resistible” and noted “one of his ears is about as long as a whole rabbit!”)

Well, Frost figured, her donkey was certainly living now. And her ears were longer.

“We’ve got that for sure,” she thought, and she was right. The ears were 15.8 inches to be precise.

Frost began an arduous process of certifying and verifying the length of Hope’s ears. To receive the Guinness stamp of proof and approval, measurements must be taken on camera. A veterinarian must sign statements.

As the effort went on, local television stations caught wind of the world-record try. In December, one deemed her, simply enough, “the donkey with long ears.”

Frost recently ordered T-shirts describing the donkey as the “Longest-Eared Ass in the World.”

Frost said the animal seemed to enjoy the attention.

“She stands there and poses,” Frost said.

Official word from Guinness didn’t arrive until Jan. 2 that, yes, the donkey’s ears were the planet’s most enormous.

The other evening while the donkey chowed down on dinner, her now-worldwide ears proudly splayed, Frost said, “She looks like a longhorn.”

Frost held up something that had just arrived in the mail.

It was a framed certificate from Guinness.

It bore the donkey’s ear measurements and her new name: Hope.

Said Frost: “It seems to fit her a lot better.”