Deer
Haven Ranch is located in the
foothills on the beautiful Central Coast of California, 15 miles
Northeast of
Santa Maria
.
The 40 acre ranch is mostly steep terrain and covered in native
California
oaks.
The owner, Anna P. Clarke, is a retired veterinarian.
She graduated from the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1964,
having emigrated there from
Ireland
in the 1950’s.
She maintained a feline-only veterinary practice in
Santa Barbara
,
California
and, in the 1970’s, she and her late
husband started a veterinary publishing company called Veterinary Practice
Publishing Company. They published
a number of veterinary magazines that had a new and unique approach,
each magazine was devoted to a single animal species…Canine Practice, Feline
Practice, Equine Practice. They
also published a number of veterinary books, client information brochures, and
surgical charts.
Anna wrote a weekly "Pet Doctor" column for the Los Angeles
Times in the late seventies and early eighties. During this same period
she wrote a book entitled "CANINE CLINIC, The Complete Guide to the Diagnosis
and Treatment of Your Dog's Health Problems," which was published by Macmillan
Publishing Company in 1984. In 1981 they
purchased the ranch which they named Deer Haven Ranch because on their first
visit there they were delighted to see so many deer grazing on their land.
Anna’s love of donkeys started when she was a very young child in
Ireland
where she saw donkeys being used to
haul turf out of the bogs. These
poor animals were overworked and frequently overloaded hauling carts, or loaded
panniers, and sometimes even being ridden by the workmen.
Many years later Anna and her son would frequently camp in the Bureau of
Land Management land in
Nevada
where they often saw wild donkeys.
This rekindled Anna’s love of these animals.
So it was a natural progression for her to have her own donkeys when she
acquired her ranch.
In 1983 Anna acquired her first donkeys (her husband passed away earlier that
year). Three in all, one standard
gray dun jennet, one in between size gray dun jennet, and a dark brown jack that
was a 38” miniature. Anna sold
her
Santa Barbara
home and moved permanently to the
ranch in 1986 when her son graduated from high school there.
Her donkeys produced five foals over the years until she sensibly gelded
her jack. Only one of these
original donkeys is still on the ranch; two have passed on to donkey heaven at
30-plus years of age.
In 1999 Anna acquired her first miniature
donkeys, five jennets, and in 2001 a sorrel herd sire. She has added to this
original herd over the years. Anna is now concentrating on
the sorrel and black colors in her breeding program. Although the trend
in miniature donkeys is today towards the smaller sizes of 30 inches and under,
Anna does not fully approve of this. From her experience as a veterinarian
she thinks the miniature donkey breeders are heading for trouble as these
smaller donkeys that she has seen at the shows often do not have good
conformation and appear to be tending to show the undesirable characteristics of
dwarfism. Because of the height restriction of 36 inches maximum for
registering a miniature donkey it has been necessary to have a breeding program
that fits this requirement, and for this reason small sized sires are now being
used by breeders today to keep the mature height of their miniature donkeys
under this limit.
Anna has some of these small
sires in her herd now, but she still likes her jennets to be over 32 inches, not
only because they show better conformation, but also to avoid the birthing
problems that many small sized jennets have encountered. The latter has been a
serious problem in miniature horses. The donkeys are kept in as natural an
environment as Deer Haven Ranch allows. The jennets run together
with one of the herd sires who pasture breeds them, and the jennets are only
separated from the herd when close to foaling. All foals are sold, and the
jack foals are sometimes gelded. The herd size is kept small, usually about ten donkeys,
so that each of them can be individually handled, loved, and cared for on a
daily basis.
For
general information on miniature donkeys, please visit DHR's links
page.
Visitors
are welcome at the ranch. A call before visiting is requested
(805-929-4543). Directions
and a map are available on this
web site.
