Oatman, Arizona started as a mining town around 1908. But by the mid 1930s all the mines dried up and in 1942 the last mine was closed. Nevertheless, Oatman is not one of those ghost towns along Route 66; rather, it is still very alive. It attracts thousands of visitors every year because the wild donkeys coming into the town everyday become a tourist attraction.
At the heyday of Oatman, donkeys were used by prospectors for transporting rocks inside the mines and for moving water and other supplies outside the mines. After the mines closed, the donkeys were "liberated" and they went into the surrounding mountains. The wild donkeys in Oatman today are the decedents of their domestic ancestors. They came to the town everyday because tourists feed them (When I called the town for the Thanksgiving schedule, the answer was: "the donkeys do not follow a schedule." What I meant is the schedule of the shops. I worried that if the shops do not open and no tourists are around, then the donkeys would not show up when there is no food).
In this set of photos I did not use any special software package to distort the shape of the donkeys. I simply used a wild angle lens to take close-up pictures. Needless to say, this is a bit risky because the lens was very close to their mouth. The last picture shows a donkey falling asleep. A tourist put a carrot into its mouth and it was hanging there for a while.