The comedy-drama treats Gloria as Tom’s “romantic coach.” She bites him when he wallows. She follows him to the pub and stares down a woman he is too shy to approach. In the climax, when Tom’s ex-girlfriend returns begging for forgiveness, it is Gloria who plants herself between them and refuses to move. Tom looks at the donkey, then at his ex, and says: “She’s more loyal than you ever were. I’m staying with her.”
The documentary captures a of astonishing tenderness. Santos combs Lucía’s mane with a wooden brush each morning. He cooks oatmeal for her before making his own coffee. When a female journalist asks if he is lonely, Santos replies: “Look at her eyes. She watches me sleep. She wakes me if I have bad dreams. What woman would do that for forty years without one argument?”
The film’s romantic storyline is not sexual but . Jean builds Pascal a shelter next to his own bed. He talks to Pascal each night about his late wife, his fears of dying alone, and his regrets. When a local widow tries to court Jean, he rejects her, saying: “I already have a partner who waits for me. She has long ears and she never lies.” Men Sex With Donkey
Critics at the time called it “pastoral romanticism,” noting that the cinematography frames Jean and Pascal like an old married couple: eating side by side, sleeping in parallel shots, and finally dying within hours of each other in the final act. The donkey’s bray becomes a love call across the valley. It is absurd, beautiful, and devastating. In more self-aware modern storytelling, the man-donkey relationship is used as a foil to failed human romance . Consider the 2016 British indie Hoof & Heart . The protagonist, Tom (a burned-out London architect), moves to Wales to renovate a cottage. His girlfriend leaves him for his business partner. Depressed, Tom inherits a sarcastic, rescue donkey named Gloria from his deceased neighbor.
The novel never excuses the violence, but it frames the act as a —the defense of a partner who cannot speak. Literary critics have argued that the donkey represents the “unacceptable face of grief,” forcing the reader to ask: At what point does love for an animal become a substitute for human intimacy, and is that necessarily a failure? Real-Life Inspirations: The Hermit of the Sierra In 2019, a Spanish documentary, El Último Burrero (The Last Muleteer), profiled Santos , an 82-year-old man living alone in the Sierra de Gredos with his donkey, Lucía . Santos had been married briefly in his 30s; after his divorce, he bought a donkey calf and never returned to human dating. The comedy-drama treats Gloria as Tom’s “romantic coach
It only requires presence, patience, and a stubborn refusal to let go.
Journalists labeled it “eccentric,” but Santos became a viral folk hero among animal-bonding communities. He died in 2021; Lucía reportedly lay by his grave for three days until a neighbor found her. Any article on “men with donkey relationships and romantic storylines” must acknowledge the elephant (or donkey) in the room: Zoophilia is a serious crime and a violation of animal welfare. None of the examples above depict sexual acts. Instead, they explore emotional romanticism —the same territory as Lars and the Real Girl (a man in love with a sex doll) or Her (a man in love with an OS). These stories succeed because they ask: What is love when stripped of social performance? Tom looks at the donkey, then at his
The film ends not with a human kiss, but with Tom and Gloria watching a sunset, his arm slung over her back. The tagline: “True love doesn’t leave you for a guy named Chad.” While not the main plot, the Mexican classic Pedro Páramo contains a fragment that haunts scholars: the character Abundio , a mule-driver (burrero), is driven to murder out of a distorted love for his donkey, Prudencia . In Rulfo’s elliptical prose, Abundio confesses that after his wife died, Prudencia became “the only soft breath I knew at night.” When a drunken man insults the donkey, Abundio kills him with a rock.