Donkey Trivia
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This donkey trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the humble ass from every angle: the biology (why a mule has 63 chromosomes, how far a bray carries, what the cross on a donkey's back means), the history (Egyptian pharaohs buried with donkeys, Washington's mules, the twenty-mule borax teams), and the famous donkeys of books, films and scripture, from Balaam's talking ass and Bottom's transformed head to Eeyore, Platero and Shrek's chattering sidekick. It suits animal lovers, farm and 4-H groups, pub quiz hosts looking for an unusual round, and kids who simply like donkeys. Roughly a third of the questions are easy, and the rest climb through medium to a few genuinely hard ones about wild asses and Bronze Age hybrids. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source, so the facts hold up whether you are hosting a quiz or settling an argument at the petting zoo.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is an adult male donkey called?
A jack
A jack. That is the jack in 'jackass', a word that meant nothing ruder than a male donkey when it was first recorded in the 1720s and only became an insult decades later.
Q 02Which animal is the direct ancestor of the domestic donkey?
The African wild ass
The African wild ass. Its tame descendants number in the tens of millions, yet the wild animal itself is critically endangered, with a few hundred left at most.
Q 03Which king did Apollo give a donkey's ears for preferring a rival's music?
Midas
Midas. In Ovid's telling the rival was Pan; the king hid the ears under a turban, but his barber whispered the secret into a hole in the ground, and the reeds that grew there repeated it when the wind blew.
Q 04A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and what?
A female horse
A female horse. Breeders pair the two for hybrid vigour: a mule takes strength, patience and sure-footedness from its father and athletic ability and speed from its mother.
Q 05What is the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey called?
A hinny
A hinny. Swapping which parent is which changes the animal: a hinny usually turns out smaller than its better-known cousin, with a more horse-like head, and it is far less common.
Q 06A mule's odd 63 chromosomes almost always leave it what?
Sterile
Sterile. Its two parents have different chromosome counts, so a mule's cells cannot pair them up evenly to make eggs or sperm, although on rare occasions a female mule has given birth.
Q 07On which car-free Greek island do donkeys and mules still haul the luggage, groceries and building supplies?
Hydra
Hydra. A 1950s decree meant to preserve the island's character bans wheeled vehicles, even bicycles, so goods landed at the harbour go up its steep lanes on animals' backs.
Q 08What is the name of the cynical old donkey in George Orwell's Animal Farm?
Benjamin
Benjamin. He can read as well as any pig but refuses to get involved, until he sees what is painted on the van taking his friend Boxer away and raises the alarm too late.
Q 09What distinctive marking do most donkeys carry on their backs?
A cross
A cross. It forms where a dark stripe running down the spine meets another across the shoulders, primitive markings that the donkey has kept from its wild ancestors.
Q 10Which country's donkey herd, about 11 million strong in 1990, had shrunk to roughly 3 million by 2017?
China
China. Its own herd could no longer supply a booming trade in a traditional remedy made from donkeys, so buyers turned to Africa, where several governments then banned the exports.
Q 11Ejiao, the traditional remedy behind a global trade in donkeys, is made by boiling which part of the animal?
The skin
The skin. Hides are stewed down into a prized gelatin, and demand grew so strong that families in African villages began waking to find their working donkeys stolen and skinned overnight.
Q 12The Donkey Sanctuary, which has taken in thousands of donkeys since 1969, is based near which English seaside town?
Sidmouth
Sidmouth. Founder Elisabeth Svendsen had 38 donkeys of her own when another sanctuary owner's will left her 204 more, and what had been a sideline became her full-time work.
Q 13The first donkeys in the Americas arrived on whose ships?
Christopher Columbus
Q 21In which Mexican border city did tourists pose for decades with zonkeys, donkeys painted with zebra stripes?
Tijuana
Tijuana. The stripes began as a fix for black-and-white photography, in which pale donkeys barely showed up, and they lasted long enough to become an emblem of the city.
Q 22Kungas, prized hybrids of donkeys and wild asses, pulled the war wagons of which ancient civilisation before horses arrived?
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia. DNA from 4,500-year-old skeletons showed in 2022 that breeders mated female donkeys with captured male Syrian wild asses, a wild animal that has itself since gone extinct.
Q 23Which Founding Father is called the "father of the American mule" for pioneering mule breeding in the United States?
Christopher Columbus. They reached Hispaniola in 1495 on his second voyage, and it was probably another century before Juan de Oñate brought donkeys north over the Rio Grande, where they spread with missionaries and miners.
Q 14Which name is used in the United States for the feral donkeys living west of the Rocky Mountains?
Burro
Burro. It is simply the Spanish word for donkey, and the wild herds descend from pack animals that missionaries and gold and silver prospectors lost or turned loose.
Q 15Which country is home to millions of feral donkeys, where they are officially classed as a pest?
Australia
Australia. Donkeys arrived in 1866 to work as pack and draught animals, and when motor transport replaced them they were simply turned loose to breed in the outback.
Q 16The Poitou donkey, a shaggy giant bred to sire heavy working mules, comes from which country?
France
France. When tractors ended the demand for big mules after the Second World War the breed all but vanished, and by 1980 fewer than 80 of the shaggy donkeys were left.
Q 17Miniature Mediterranean donkeys in the US descend from 1929 imports from which island?
Sardinia
Sardinia. An American stockbroker bought seven of the island's small donkeys sight unseen, and animals that nobody at home thought of as miniature became a pet breed under that name.
Q 18The kiang, the largest of the wild asses, lives on which high plateau?
The Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan Plateau. Kiangs graze there above 4,000 metres, and they are the one kind of wild ass that is not in trouble: conservationists rate the species of least concern.
Q 19Roman soldiers borrowed the name of the onager, a wild ass, for which kind of siege weapon?
A catapult
A catapult. A Roman officer who served with them wrote that the stone thrower got its name because hunted wild asses were said to kick stones back at their pursuers.
Q 20In a Brothers Grimm tale, a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster set out to become musicians in which city?
Bremen
Bremen. They never get there: on the way they scare a band of robbers out of a house in the woods and like it so much that they stay for good.
George Washington
George Washington. In 1785 Spain's Charles III sent him a prized stud donkey, which he named Royal Gift, and he hired the animal out so that other farmers could breed mules too.
Q 24The famous twenty-mule teams of the 1880s hauled wagons of borax out of which California valley?
Death Valley
Death Valley. Each 'twenty-mule team' was really eighteen mules and two horses, and it needed ten days to drag its wagons the 165 miles to the nearest railhead.
Q 25In American politics, the donkey is the unofficial mascot of whom?
The Democrats
The Democrats. Opponents mocked the party's 1828 presidential candidate as a donkey, and he took up the insult and put the animal on his posters; cartoonist Thomas Nast later popularised it as the party's symbol.
Q 26In the Book of Numbers, whose donkey sees an angel blocking the road and speaks to its master?
Balaam
Balaam. The king of Moab had hired him to curse the Israelites, but after the donkey's rebuke he could only bless them, three times over, to the king's fury.
Q 27Which biblical judge killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey?
Samson
Samson. The place was named Jawbone Hill after the fight, and the victor then nearly died of thirst there until water sprang out of a hollow in the ground.
Q 28Christians remember Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem on which day of the church year?
Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday. The name comes from the branches the crowd waved and laid in his path, and Matthew says the humble mount was chosen to fulfil a prophecy of a king arriving on a donkey.
Q 29Who voices Donkey in the Shrek films?
Eddie Murphy
Eddie Murphy. His motor-mouthed sidekick ends up married to the fire-breathing Dragon who once guarded the princess, and the couple's flying children are known as Dronkeys.
Q 30The real Christopher Robin's stuffed Eeyore now lives in which city's public library?
New York
New York. The stuffed animals left England in 1947 to tour America with A. A. Milne's US publisher, which kept them for forty years and gave them to the library in 1987.