In April 2011 a donkey called Dotty was given a bravery medal for what she did in the ten seconds after a dog got into her paddock outside Scarborough. She lived with a sheep. Not a flock. One sheep, called Stanley, put in with her for company, which is the most ordinary arrangement on a smallholding in England and nobody gives it a second thought. Then the dog came over the wall. Anybody who keeps stock has a particular dread of this and it is nothing like the version in films. A dog in with sheep is not hungry. It is having the best afternoon of its life. It goes for the back end, it does not stop when the sheep stops running, and the damage is usually past what a vet can mend. The dog does not even have to make contact: a flock chased hard enough will abort its lambs a fortnight later, and the farmer finds that out in the spring. Stanley is alive because the donkey came across that paddock at a gallop and put herself in the gap. The dog left. The PDSA gave Dotty their Certificate for Animal Bravery, an award with a real assessment behind it that normally goes to police dogs. Work out what she had to hold in her head to do that. Recognition that a particular animal, on ground she knew every inch of, was in a category of trouble she had never encountered before. That the sheep could not sort it out. That she could. That the correct place for a donkey to stand was between the two of them, and that she needed to be there now rather than shortly. We have no word for that in a donkey. We have a word for a donkey who stops at a stream because she does not like the look of the bottom, and the word is stubborn. The dog, incidentally, belonged to somebody. They always do.