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Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)

486. THE DRIVER AND THE DONKEY ON THE CLIFF
Perry 186 (Chambry 277 *)

A donkey had turned aside from the main road and was heading for a cliff. The driver shouted at him, 'Where are you going, you wretched beast?' He grabbed hold of the donkey's tail and tried to drag him back from the cliff, but the donkey did not stop and instead kept going forward. So the man pushed the donkey even harder than he had pulled him back and said, 'Go ahead then! You can take the worthless victor's crown in this damned contest.'
The fable criticizes people who are destroyed by their own stupidity.

Source: Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura Gibbs. Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.
NOTE: New cover, with new ISBN, published in 2008; contents of book unchanged.