Steve Brown meets the manager of the Derbyshire farm of an animal charity set up 50 years ago.
THE archetypal Christmas crib scene sees baby Jesus in a manger, surrounded by Mary and Joseph and the animals to whose home the stable is. Among those creatures is invariably a donkey. And it will not be lost on Christians that, approaching the end of his life, Jesus would ride on a donkey into the city of Jerusalem and that, henceforward, the sign of the cross would invariably be marked in the animal’s grey coat.