MENDOCINO CO., 9/27/26 — Ron King spent four and a half years running a donkey rescue in Hopland before his veterinarian explained shipping fever to him.
“Kate came to me and said, ‘You could be doing better by the donkeys than you’re doing,'” King said in a Zoom interview Sept. 21. “And she explained to me what shipping fever is.”
Kate is Dr. Kate Schoenhals, who joined Oscar’s Place a year ago. The rescue buys donkeys at an auction in Bowie, Texas, and until this month it trucked them straight to Hopland. Put a sick donkey on a trailer for 32 hours, King said, and it gets sicker, and “It also gets all the healthy animals on that trailer sick.”
“I just didn’t know that,” he said. “And so when she pointed it out, I had to put the word out that we needed to change our operations. And so that’s how this whole place came to be in Texas.”
The place King means is a donkey hospital in Collinsville, Texas, which Oscar’s Place opened Sept. 5. The Hopland nonprofit took title to the land July 1, Grayson County appraisal records show. King described it as a 40-acre ranch “exactly one hour and 15 minutes from the Bowie auction, which is where we buy our donkeys.” The county lists the nonprofit’s three parcels there at about 34.5 acres, appraised this year at a combined $1.62 million.
The first patients came from an auction rescue the next day. There were 14. Schoenhals said at least half arrived with the flu.
The auction brings together “a bunch of different animals from a bunch of different places,” she said. “It’s also like a cesspool for infectious disease.” It’s “kind of like kids going to kindergarten, you know, they just get exposed to all these germs.”
Flu in a donkey can turn into pneumonia “pretty dramatically, pretty easily,” she said. Since the hospital opened, six donkeys have gotten pretty sick. As of Sept. 21, two were still getting “relatively intensive treatment.”
Trucked straight to Hopland, King said, those animals would have been in much worse shape. This time, “within two hours of being purchased at the auction, they were having their lungs scanned and their blood tested.”
The ranch was already built out for most of what the rescue needed, King said. The rescue added biosecurity and equipment. There’s a 14-stall hospital barn, a 10-stall rehabilitation barn, a 140-foot covered intake arena and five or six outdoor pastures. The hospital barn carries Schoenhals’ name, King said, “because it was her standing up for donkeys that made all this possible.”
None of the patients are supposed to stay. “This will never be where our donkeys live,” King said. Once they’re healthy, they go to California, where the rescue works with them and finds them homes.
Banks is one exception. He’s 30, he came in Sept. 6 “skin and bones,” and he’ll spend his last years in Texas, King said.
Donkeys are “not emphasized as a separate species” in veterinary school, for the most part, Schoenhals said. They might be 10% to 20% of an equine vet’s caseload, she said, and “We kind of just treat them like horses.” Horses can be “flighty drama queens,” she said, while donkeys “try to make good choices to protect themselves.”
The patient she thinks of first came in from an earlier auction rescue, back in Hopland. Forty-five donkeys arrived, very sick. One was Jake, a “skinny white little lost donkey,” she said. He had pneumonia and several infections at once, then terrible diarrhea. “He was actively dying,” she said. He hung on anyway. He didn’t like people then.
He does now. “I would say twice a week I walk down to the pasture, I lay down on the ground, and I spoon with Jake,” King said.
Back in Hopland
King founded Oscar’s Place in 2021 with Phil Selway, a Los Angeles art dealer who chairs the nonprofit’s board. It’s named for Selway’s cat. “So I run a donkey rescue named after a dead cat,” King said. “Probably the only one.”
The main ranch is on Highway 175 in Hopland, and there’s a second site in Potter Valley. The Voice profiled King in December , before the “Donkey King” television series premiered on ABC stations in January.
Bernadette Byrne volunteers at the Hopland ranch about once a week. Byrne, the former executive director of Mendocino WineGrowers Inc., is a friend of mine. Volunteer days are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, she said in a phone interview Sept. 21. Some regulars come four days a week.
“It’s the most joyful place there is, because you basically are going around loving on donkeys,” she said. She seeks out the ones on stall rest or in isolation. “They just need some attention.”
Potter Valley gets the donkeys that are healthy and don’t need as much medical care, including ones that don’t relish people. The pastures there are on a hill the animals climb every day, which is good for a donkey that needs to lose weight, she said.
When the TV show came on, the volunteers worried. “We just didn’t want our little piece of heaven to change,” Byrne said. There are more volunteers than two or three years ago, she said, but “it’s not a crazy amount.”
Some volunteers come from out of state, she said. Visitors come from as far as Colorado and Wyoming, some stay in Hopland for a week, and the town’s restaurants and hotels get the business. She doesn’t see that the rescue has changed the town dramatically, she said, “but I see a lot of the upsides.”
The money
The Texas hospital follows a year in which the nonprofit’s income more than doubled. Its 2025 tax return, filed in May, reports $7.65 million in contributions, up from $2.87 million in 2024. It spent $5.32 million in 2025. That includes $1.54 million the return lists as an education and outreach program for the “Donkey King” TV show. Net assets went from $553,000 to $4.56 million. By the end of 2025, before the Texas deed, the nonprofit’s land, buildings and equipment had cost $4.65 million. The return reports 23 employees. King was paid $158,650.
“Our average donation is a $27 monthly donation, and that donor is on Social Security,” King said.
The rescue now has three locations in two states. “We have no ambition to be the largest donkey rescue,” he said. “We didn’t expand to this facility because we wanted to expand. We expanded to this facility because we needed to do better.”
Byrne said the show has put Hopland on the map. “Ron’s been a very generous community partner to Mendocino County as well as to Hopland,” she said.
What does the Texas hospital need next? A skid steer, King said.