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 inquiry, officials said on 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.
PHOTO: AFP
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 said. “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 organizers 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.
“The donkey landed in an atrocious manner: It was dragged several meters along the water, after which the animal was pulled out half-alive onto the shore,” the newspaper Taman said late last week.
The incident is stunning even for a country where animal cruelty is widespread and came as a shock to the locals, Taman editor Yelena Yovleva said.
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 said. “I wonder how the guys [the onlookers] did not knock his teeth out.”
Animal rights groups said they were flabbergasted.
“The sadists have shown their know-how,” said Konstantin Sabinin, a projects director at Vita. “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 theater to attack opposition activists.
Russian 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.
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