Order In The Court

"You, there. Stop that braying at once." In what is quite possibly a new low for American jurisprudence, a lawyer has called a donkey for the defense. No, the lawyer was calling names, nor was anyone calling the lawyer a donkey. The lawyer introduced the donkey as the first witness in a lawsuit in a Dallas courtroom.

DALLAS - The first witness in a lawsuit Wednesday between two neighbors was a real ass. Buddy the donkey walked to the bench and stared at the jury, the picture of a gentle, well-mannered creature and not the loud, aggressive animal he had been accused of being.

The donkey was at the center of a dispute between oilman John Cantrell and attorney Gregory Shamoun that began after Cantrell complained about a storage shed Shamoun was building in his backyard in Dallas.

He said Shamoun retaliated by bringing Buddy from his ranch in Midlothian and putting him in the backyard.

Cantrell complained of donkey noise and manure piles.

"They bray a lot any time day or night. You never know when they're going to cut loose," he testified.

Shamoun said Buddy was there to serve as a surrogate mother for a calf named Lucy that needed to be bottle-fed.

We could make some gratuitous jokes about not being able to tell the donkey apart from the lawyers or the litigants, but that would be cruel. The donkey deserves better.