Burro in pants

I saw the burro wearing pants and carrying a basket filled with paper flowers.

“Oh, my gosh!” I said. “That poor burro.”

There are several burros with this job in this Mexican town and, as burro employment goes, it’s a pretty easy gig. The burro wears a rustic basket filled with bright paper flowers and is led by a man in a similarly rustic costume, and they follow wedding processions, providing photo opportunities for the guests. The burro is photographed dozens of times and spends the afternoon in the park, doing her best to look picturesque. 

On weekdays, when weddings are less common, the burro and her handler park themselves on a narrow bit of cobblestone street with a beautiful view of the old church in the background. Tourists get their photos taken with the burro for a few pesos. I saw no harm in it until the day the burro showed up in pants. 

“Oh, my gosh!” And I felt a sense of indignation rising on the burro’s behalf. 

I mean, it’s one thing to carry around fake flowers all day. It is another thing entirely (according to me) to put the poor burro in trousers. To add insult to injury, the pants were not even on her back legs! She was wearing trousers on her front legs that made her look sort of like a little person with a donkey head. 

“Outrageous!” I decided in furious defense of the burro’s dignity. Making a burro dress up in a silly costume was somehow intolerable, as far as I was concerned. Her handler was making her look comical, a ridiculous punchline to lure more tourists in. She was a joke burro, and I decided — from my vantage point as the Tourist Who Knows Everything — this was unacceptable. 

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