A braying donkey attached to a parasail and sent
soaring in the blue skies above the beaches of southern Russia has
stunned holidaymakers and prompted a police enquiry, officials said
Tuesday.
Attached to a parachute pulled by a speedboat, the apparently
terrified animal circled over heads of holidaymakers sunbathing
last week on a beach on the Sea of Azov in the Cossack village of
Golubitskaya in the Krasnodar region.
A regional police spokeswoman said the donkey ended up in the
skies as a result of an impromptu advertising campaign by several
entrepreneurial Russians to attract beachgoers to their beach where
they could indulge in the thrill of parasailing.
Instead, they attracted the attention of regional police who
learned of the flying donkey earlier this week and launched a
probe.
"The donkey screamed and children cried," regional police
spokeswoman Larisa Tuchkova told AFP. "No-one had the brains to
call police."
Instead, she said, people reached for their cameras and
bombarded a local newspaper with phone calls.
Pictures broadcast on state television showed the organisers of
the stunt attaching the cords of the parasail to the donkey's back
on the beach as dozens of holidaymakers looked on.
As the speedboat moved, the donkey was swept from the beach at
speed and taken high into the sky, frantically swinging its legs in
panic as the boat circled around the water.
"It was put up so high into the sky that the children on the
beach cried and asked their parents: 'Why did they tie a doggy to a
parachute?'" the newspaper, Taman, said late last week.
"The donkey landed in an atrocious manner: it was dragged
several metres along the water, after which the animal was pulled
out half-alive onto the shore."
The incident is stunning even for a country where animal cruelty
is widespread and came as a shock to the locals, said Taman
newspaper's editor, Yelena Yovleva.
"This has never happened before," she told AFP.
Another regional police spokesman, Denis Yegorov, said the owner
of the donkey had left the village taking the animal with him. "We
are now looking for him," he told AFP.
"I wonder how the guys (the onlookers) did not knock his teeth
out," Yegorov added.
Animal rights groups, meanwhile, said they were
flabbergasted.
"The sadists have shown their know-how," Konstantin Sabinin, a
projects director at Vita told AFP. "It's an extremely despicable
event."
Earlier in the day Vita filed an official request to the General
Prosecutor's Office to punish those responsible for "egregious
cruelty".
The animal rights group called on the authorities to take the
incident seriously to finally put a stop to animal cruelty in
Russia.
Activists say Russian laws protecting animals are woefully
inadequate.
Pro-Kremlin youth groups have in the past used various animals
and birds, including an ostrich, a turkey, sheep and a dead
donkey's ears, for their bizarre street theatre to attack
opposition activists.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has engaged in a string of stunts
involving nature and wild animals in the last year, which analysts
say could be aimed at raising his profile ahead of a possible
return to the Kremlin as president in 2012 polls.
In May he was shown on television personally guiding a leopard
presented by Iran into its enclosure and a week earlier attaching a
collar to a polar bear in the Far North.
