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Crime

Owner forced to pay up after donkey bites car

September 28, 2017

Why would a donkey bite the back of a McLaren 650S Spyder? Police think this one may have thought the car was a carrot.

https://p.dw.com/p/2kv9Q
Donkey in a field in Hessen
The perpetrator is still showing no signs of remorse. Except the long face.Image: picture alliance/dpa/Hit Radio FFH

A court in the western German town of Giessen on Thursday found a donkey guilty of biting the backside of an expensive orange sports car and ordered the owners to pay 5,800 euros ($6,800) in damages.

The attack happened in the countryside not far from Giessen in September 2016. Markus Zahn was driving his bright orange McLaren 650S Spyder on his way to his doctor when he decided to reverse down a country lane to make a U-turn.

Out of nowhere, Vitus the donkey appeared in Zahn's rear mirror and bit twice at the back of the vehicle. The donkey – as a witness later told the court – had reached over a fence to get at the vehicle from a nearby field.

Zahn decided to sue after the donkey owner's insurance refused to pay for the damage. The owner himself declined to pay for the rest of the repair work and told Zahn that he should have picked a better parking space.

Read more: My favorite - the donkey

Markus Zahn shows his McLaren sports car that was bitten by a donkey in Hessen.
Markus Zahn was on his way to the doctor when Vitus appeared in his back mirror and attacked his carImage: picture alliance/dpa/C. Eckenfels

The donkey did little to clear up what had happened or why he had decided to attack Zahn's car. "The background to the crime is still completely unclear; it was not possible to get more of a 'hee haw' out of him," local police said in a statement after the incident. 

Police later said the donkey may have mistaken the orange car for a multidimensional carrot. But the court found no evidence for that claim on Thursday.

In a twist, they did tell Zahn that he was not the first victim of the four-legged criminal when one judge asked him: "Did you know that a dangerous donkey was up to mischief in the area?" He was alluding to a previous attack.

amp/kms (AP, dpa)