Donkey Love sounds like a cute documentary, right? You imagine a wholesome, inoffensive glimpse into the lives of these adorable, fuzzy creatures — their owners brushing their soft hair and dressing them in fancy outfits. What you probably don’t imagine is a documentary about bestiality, but that's exactly what it is.

Directed by Daryl Stoneage, the 2012 documentary was controversial enough to get an entire film festival cancelled. It’s one of a small handful of video explorations into a niche tradition practiced in very specific, coastal areas of Colombia.

In these regions, it’s seemingly not uncommon for guys to fuck donkeys — only the female donkeys, of course — but various videos on the subject float different theories as to why they do this. Some describe it as an old-school birth-control method, others a kind of anti-homosexuality conversion therapy (don’t fuck a dude, fuck a donkey) and a third group apparently believe that doing so will make their dicks grow bigger.

The most recent high-profile exploration of these unsurprisingly viral stories took place when British presenter Sue Perkins, beloved for her cheeky cum jokes on The Great British Bake Off, traveled to South America as part of her docuseries, Sue Perkins: Barely Legal. It’s an attempt to shake off the looming specter of middle age by white-water rafting with sex workers, trying new drugs and, bizarrely, sleuthing the Colombian coastline to find these mythical “donkey bonkers.”

It all starts when she meets Colombian comedian Ivan Marin, who recalls a particularly awkward stand-up gig for a room full of coal miners. “I asked, as a joke, who has fucked a donkey,” he tells a bewildered Perkins. “Two hundred hands raised, I swear! In some parts of the Colombian coast, it’s common for men to have sex with donkeys. I bet you 2,000 Colombian pesos that I can find you two men to talk to us about this.”

Perkins — a die-hard animal lover — is adamant that it’s a joke. They stop bemused cyclists and random pedestrians to ask if they’ve ever engaged in donkey sex, but their attempts draw a blank. That is, until they stumble across a bar of guys who all animatedly raise their hands to admit to bestiality, and then simulate their rabid thrusts in front of a “horrified” Perkins.

Donkey Love takes an even more lighthearted approach; the trailer opens with, “It’s nice to be in a country where the women are beautiful and the men have sex with donkeys.” In an in-depth research paper published in the peer-reviewed Animals journal, academic José María Valcuende del Río explains that these men are colloquially known as comeburras — donkey-eaters — and that “children” sometimes “have their first sexual experiences with female donkeys. They might even pay for sex with these animals.”

Again, these are extremely niche and often outdated examples in very specific parts of the country — zoophilia has been illegal in Colombia since 2015, when wide-ranging animal rights laws were passed — and the documentaries about donkey-bonkers, with the exception of Perkins’ latest docuseries, were all filmed pre-2015.

In other words, it’s now considered a very old-fashioned kind of ass play.