Donkeys Are Healing Psychiatric Patients in France—And Science Wants In

It’s a Friday at Ville-Evrard hospital complex in Neuilly-sur-Marne, near Paris, and patients dealing with psychiatric disorders, anxiety, and loneliness aren’t sitting in waiting rooms. They’re in a wooded farm sanctuary petting donkeys named Nono, Pitou, Oscar, Manolo, and Malraux.

This isn’t feel-good theater. The donkey therapy program at Ville-Evrard is producing measurable relief—reported by patients themselves, documented by hospital staff, and now compelling enough that organizers want rigorous scientific research to prove what they’re seeing actually works. If that happens, the program could spread across France.

Here’s the thing about donkeys: we’ve stereotyped them for centuries as stubborn pack animals, but they were domesticated over 2,000 years before horses ever saw a saddle. That long history of cooperation with humans has made them gentle, social, and intelligent—exactly the qualities that make them effective therapy animals. They don’t judge. They don’t demand. They just exist in a calm, grounded way that somehow helps people reset.

The program, launched by married couple Ermelinda and François Hadey, started with trained donkeys arriving in 2016. Ermelinda, a psychiatric therapy nurse, believed deeply in animal therapy from the start. It’s grown to include goats, turtles, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, and doves, but the donkeys remain the centerpiece. Patients attend free of charge. One 52-year-old patient named Jérôme described how the experience breaks him out of the medication-and-treatment grind:“Talking with people, taking part in activities I wouldn’t normally do, it helps me in my daily life. It helps you break away from the routine of treatment and medication. Staying at home isn’t good for me.”

Nursing student Alicia Fabi, 18, observes the change every time:“Every time we come back from the activity, they say they feel good, calm and relaxed, and that they enjoyed the outing. That’s really positive.”

What makes this story worth watching isn’t just the feel-good angle—it’s that the hospital and the Hadeys recognize anecdotal evidence, no matter how compelling, isn’t enough. They’re pushing for formal scientific study. That’s how you move a therapy program from one hospital’s pride to a standard of care across a country. In mental health treatment, where outcomes matter and resources are tight, proving that a donkey can do what medication sometimes can’t—or can do alongside medication—changes the conversation.