Riverside has a donkey dilemma. Can science offer clues for coexistence?

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Set us as preferred For students at UC Riverside, the start of fall semester means picking up their class syllabus, catching up with friends and snapping selfies with the adorable wild donkeys that roam around the school.The hoofed Highlanders have been embraced as an unofficial mascot on campus, with Reddit threads dedicated to donkey spotting and burro plushies for sale in the campus store.

The animals’ relationship with residents in the surrounding hillside communities of the Inland Empire is more complicated.Though many residents share a love for the wild burros, others see them as a public safety risk due to the possibility of car crashes, property damage or injuries during close encounters.And when it comes to decisions about how best to manage the population, tensions often run high.A community firestorm erupted after San Bernardino County contracted with a Texas-based nonprofit to relocate hundreds of wild donkeys to a sanctuary in the Lone Star State, resulting in death threats against the nonprofit’s leader and ultimately leading officials to terminate the agreement last year.Outrage was sparked again this year after reports that someone (or possibly multiple people) had shot at least half a dozen donkeys with arrows in a series of unsolved attacks.

California Animal activists have raised $50,000 as a reward for information that leads to the arrest of those responsible for attacking donkeys in the Inland Empire.Despite the extensive commentary swirling around the burros, surprisingly little is known about the herd itself.This includes key questions such as how many live in the Inland Empire, whether the population is growing and how they are affecting the ecosystem.A team of researchers at UC Riverside is on a mission to change that by studying the wild population in hopes of gaining insights that can improve c...