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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2005 
Mexico's Legendary Burro Gets A Reprieve
 Chris Kraul - LATimes
Mezquital, Mexico — If you ask Epifanio Flores, his burro isn't a beast of burden. It's just a burden.
"They eat 10 times what a cow eats, and they are nothing but trouble," the peasant farmer said as he took some shade in the baking central plaza of this agricultural town in southern Durango state.
He is among the thousands of Mexican farmers scratching out a living amid mesquite and cactus who have switched from the once-indispensable burros to pickup trucks and tractors to do their farm work. For Flores, the long-eared and long-revered emblem of Mexican rural life has become just another mouth to feed.
Now the state of Durango says the feral burros — 100,000 at last count — have proliferated to the point that they are consuming unacceptably large amounts of pastureland that could sustain "productive" livestock such as cows, sheep and goats. The state blames the wild beasts for everything from increased erosion to a lowering of the water tables.
But when it announced plans to "regulate" the burros, animal-rights activists from Egypt to Uruguay howled about a possible burrocidio, or mass extermination of the animals.
The proposal, announced in May but now on hold, seemed simple enough: a subsidized plan giving farmers incentives to round up the beasts and exchange them for calves, goats or sheep.
After being turned in, the burros would be "regulated" — that is, taken to the local slaughterhouses and converted into their only commercially viable forms: dog food, meat for zoo animals, or sausage for human consumption.
The plan drew solid support from Mexico's two largest peasant labor unions. Raul Castaneda, general secretary of the Durango unit of the National Peasants Council, said: "Burros cause more damage than benefit. Our members are completely behind the de-burroization."
But after the newspaper El Siglo of Durango city wrote about the plan, and published it on its Web site, more than 100 cyber-cries of protest were sent to the newspaper from far corners of the world. The newspaper's poll of about 100 Durango residents showed 95 percent want to spare the burros.
Durango historian Manuel Lozoya Cigueroa said that until recent years, much of the state was inaccessible except to farmers who had burros to carry supplies, farm products, firewood and water.
Burros also played an important part in Durango's mining industry, the second largest in the country, lugging supplies up the Sierra Madre to the mines, and silver, gold and other metals down from them.
Several Mexican states observe National Burro Day on June 1. "In all of Mexico, in all of Mesoamerica, in fact, burros had an important role as beast of burden from the 16th century on to the beginning of the 20th century," Lozoya Cigueroa said. "But they have been replaced by the internal combustion engine."
To tourists, they are an adorable fixture with their docile eyes, furry ears and loud heehawing across canyons.
For farmers and cattlemen, however, they have become pests, ravenously consuming scarce pastureland like giant locusts.
Despite the burros' drawbacks, many peasants are reluctant to give up the beasts because they regard them as pets, like a dog or a cat. |
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