Hunter Valley donkeys have come a long way in rehoming

When Diane Parnell woke to find 25 sheep dead at her Hunter Valley property, she was devastated.

Wild dogs had been lingering for years but the attack that night was the worst.

They just ran them down, killed them, didn't eat them, didn't tear them to bits or anything - it's just a sport for them. Ms Parnell would wake at night to check the sheep, she invested in cameras to monitor them and even tried alpacas to keep the dogs away.

The dogs got the alpacas. The saviour was an animal that was known best for its stubborn nature, but donkeys have an incredible ability to bond with other livestock and protect them from predators.

She's lovely the sheep follow her like she's her mum, Ms Parnell said of her donkey.

Ms Parnell's Quiet Donkeys are hard to find in New South Wales.

Hers came from the Last Stop Donkey Program LSDP, a Hunter Valley charity that works to rehome feral donkeys as guardians.

After learning about the extent of how they were culled in outback Australia, LSDP founder Brooke Purvis said she knew there had to be something more that could be done with donkeys.

The donkeys are classified as feral because they are taking up prime livestock feed, for farmers they're of no value and mustering is pretty interesting, so there are a lot of costs there in mustering.

Ms Purvis began learning how to break in donkeys and support local farmers to find their confidence again.

She said that sheep farming went back a generation or so and a lot of people went out of that due to stock losses.

They're worth their weight in gold through lambing and calving.

If something comes into their paddock, they're quite territorial and they actually go towards the danger, so if a dog comes in to attack, a donkey just stomps it or runs it off. The Last Stop Donkey Program took place at St Catherine's Catholic College in Singleton, where agriculture students were a key part of the training of the once-feral animals.

We just applied that sort of learning because the donkeys were probably quite similar to breaking in cattle, and it was just no, agriculture teacher Joanna Towers said.

It was just learning on the job and just gaining appreciation for their personalities and how they like to be treated, that whole reward system. Student Jacob Merrick can't believe how far the donkeys have come.

They were feral, he said.

They'd come straight out of the Northern Territory, no human contact, had been mustered in helicopters, quads, and they've never had facilities like at St Catherine's, so it's really different for them and different for me.

I am quite proud of what we've achieved, and I'm quite impressed. Jaslin Boyd worked alongside the initial team, and she and Jacob have become a key part of the LSDP outside of school.

At the beginning, I really had no idea what to expect, but now they're completely different from everything I've worked with, Jaslin said.

They have their days off, or when they want to work with you, but we just work around that.

The LSDP team quickly learned that gaining the trust of the donkeys was one of the most important things.

Most farmers considering donkeys worry they don't know how to care for them, which is why she started doing training days.

The welfare of the donkeys has to be taken into account because we hear a lot of stories where farmers just turn them out in the paddock with their sheep, and their teeth, feet, all of that is ignored.