and his feet get sore evey spring when the grass comes in.

More than one farrier has expressed surprise at how good my jack esp. is.

 Mine take it like a horse but some are real bastards about their feet.

.... back to normal looking. He is "metabolically challenged" and had bad feet when we got him.   He is the only animal that has bitten me badly that I forgave quickly, because the alternative could have been so much worse... they can kick with deadly accuracy.

He lets me or my husband trim him, but it takes 4 people to draw blood. He's not allowed to get sick. We'd have to blow dart him with a tranquilizer. He's had a couple of bouts of grass founder (2 springs ago was bad, it was a very wet spring, and he had to be drylotted completely for a while and I even gave him a quarter tab of bute for 2 days because he was laying down and being miserable, I just put grass hay next to him and made sure to hand water him several times a day. He wasn't drinking properly on his own. ) Now I keep him on a pasture where the grass is deliberately kept very short so the horse he lives with also does not founder. If he is on a better pasture, I have to drylot him either during the day or night during the spring and early summer so his feet don't get sore.    

My farrier kept on looking at him every time he came to do the horses and after several years of asking, I finally let him do him (he is very, very good with the handling part of the equine thing) and now his feet look pretty good, for what we started with.  This donkey would just stand there next to the horse he was trimming and study what he was doing.  The first time he tried trimming his favorite horse, he pinned his ears and tried coming up behind and biting the farrier but I got after him quickly.

A lot of times with these animals who are defensive about their feet, because they have a major problem,  if they have to be trimmed they can be given a little bit of aspirin or bute beforehand and the vet can also give one a tranquilizer shot, to make sure the farrier survives the experience. ( I am not into drugging animals but I'm also not into seeing the humans getting things broken, and it's a learning experience, the animal learns it won't hurt.)  We had to do this when our one horse suffered a tremendously bad hoof crack that split the hoof all the way up to the hairline (uuhhhhghhh) and he had to be shod a special way for months as it grew out.  This thing hurt way too much to expect the horse to just stand there thru a trim and shoeing, so I took him to a vet clinic for it where he could be professionally dosed with the correct amount.  

Donkeys shouldn't get grain, they are tremendously easy keepers.

.... net.  It's another way to teach animals that has very positive results because the animal learns to seek out a task it gets rewarded for by a "click" sound you make with your tongue. (or it can be another sound, but clicks are easiest.)  Sometimes the "click" is accompanied by a small food treat.   By making the rewards slightly random, the behavior is actually reinforced better.

I clicker train a lot of the horses who are being funky with some sort of scary experience, and they learn if they seek out their "target" , they get a click and a treat or a click and a scratch on the neck or belly.  I use little tiny handfuls of good hay stuffed in my pockets for the horses and burro, it works just as well as carrots.

For picking up a foot, for example, I would set the burro in the proper position to make putting up the foot I wanted more easy (there are tricks to this, for a front foot, you want that foot slightly more forward, because then the animal is bearing weight on the other foot already) and then make a "click" sound and give it a treat.  I'd then work on touching the leg, every time it held still and didn't object, more clicks, more treats.  Then I'd touch the reflex points on the point of the shoulder and leg (rubbing the chestnut area)  that cause the foot to automatically come up in the air... when this happens, more clicks, more treats.

So far the donkey is now picking his foot up for a click on his own reaction, instead of me trying to bend over, wrestling with it, and risking getting kicked or bitten, all for a taste of hay.  A win - win situation.

The other trick is to put the foot back down before the donkey objects, which means, in the beginning, immediately.  Then as you repeat this sort of thing, you gradually hold it up longer and longer, but always give the foot back before the animal wants it.  This teaches the animal that you are not going to try to hurt it. (this is also where most people screw up, because they try to hold on too long, thinking they can outpower the animal.)  It also obviously teaches them that they can earn clicks and treats by doing what they thought was impossible.

The timing of the reward of the release is the crucial point.  Release and reward when the animal is doing the right thing.

Gradually you will feel the animal try to wiggle a bit and want its foot back before you are ready.  This is when you tell it to wait, and then when the animal relaxes a second, that is when you release the foot.  This teaches the animal that it can request you to politely let it have the foot back. This is pretty revolutionary, if they think you've figured out that they can ask for a rest break, and that you respond if they're polite about it, then they don't have anything to fight over anymore.

This clicker training stuff is not the same as just "giving treats" , which is how it is sometimes misunderstood.  Once the animal gets used to being "clicked,"  it serves as a sort of automatic feedback system so it knows it is doing/ it did the right thing...  I just thought of this now this morning as I was automatically clicking the dog with the sound when I called it and had it walking along side of me back up to the house.

For a donkey who  was very defensive about his hind feet I'd also do some desensitizing work with it with a soft cotton rope first before I even went near there, a la Parelli style.  Since I don't bend over so well anyway, I'd rather pick the hind foot up with a soft rope (no knots, no loops, just doubled over) first and get the cue response established before trying to do it manually. ( I also have a hoof stand to hold up the back feet, which is so nifty my farrier got one, too. The animals actually like the thing better than a human holding them, so I just clicker- trained them to put the foot on the cradle part).