LOS ANGELES TIMES - 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.
...
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 coexistence between humans and donkeys.
“Donkeys are very strong animals; they bite, they kick,” said associate professor Marko Spasojevic. “We want to avoid those conflicts by better understanding where they go, what resources they need and ideally help Riverside County take care of these populations.”