Flying donkey shocks Russian beachgoers

A donkey attached to a parachute flies over a beach in Golubitskayas, Russia. Photo: AFP

Russian beachgoers got a shock when they saw a donkey soaring in the blue skies over the balmy beaches on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia last week, police said Tuesday.

Attached to a parachute, the animal screamed in fear as it circled above people sunbathing on a beach in the Cossack village in the Krasnodar region.

A police spokeswoman said the donkey ended up in the skies as a result of an impromptu advertising campaign conducted by several Russian entrepreneurs, but it attracted the attention of regional police who learned of the flying donkey earlier this week and launched a probe.

"The donkey screamed and children cried," a regional police spokeswoman Larisa Tuchkova said. "No one had the brains to call police."

Instead, she said, people reached for their cameras and bombarded a local newspaper with phone calls.

"It was put up so high in the sky that the children on the beach cried and asked their parents, "Why did they tie a doggy to a parachute?" the newspaper, Taman, said late last week.

"The donkey landed in an atrocious manner: It was dragged several meters along the water, after which the animal was pulled out half-alive onto the shore."

The incident is shocking, even for a country where animal cruelty is widespread, and it came as a shock to the locals, said the Taman newspaper's editor, Elena Iovleva. "This has never happened before."

AFP