The humble donkey under global threat
According to a report by the environmental watchdog, Robin des Bois, there has been a tremendous boom in donkey skin exports to China
WITH the raging rhino war and pangolin slaughter continuing unabated, it appears the next species which is set to be driven to extinction could be the humble donkey.
According to a report by the environmental watchdog, Robin des Bois, there has been a tremendous boom in donkey skin exports to China.
Most of these skins are coming from Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and South Africa.
The South African donkeys are being sourced mainly from the Limpopo province.
The price is being driven by demand and a donkey was sold in Egypt for R245 two years ago, is now worth and R2 450 today.
Burkina Faso shows the largest increase in skin sales, with 1 000 skins exported in the first quarter of 2015, 18 000 in the fourth quarter and 65 000 in the first half of 2016.
On 3 August the Burkinese government banned the export of live donkeys and donkey parts.
Mali and Niger took similar decisions.
If the trend in Burkina Faso continues, up to 1.3 million donkeys could be killed within 5 years.
Only the skins are used and the meat is partly burned near undercover slaughterhouses.
Neighbours of the Sahel Slaughterhouse, a registered establishment run by a Frenchman and Chinese associates, are seeing trucks filled with donkeys coming in from Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Mauritius.
Social implications
The loss of donkeys in Africa could become a cultural, agricultural and social disaster.
Already the Minister of Animal Resources in Burkina Faso has put a project to distribute 10 000 ploughs to rural communities on ice because the donkeys are disappearing.
Donkeys carry water, wood, clay and are the main means of transportation of children.
Some families do not resist the temptation of some quick cash and sell their donkeys for R2 160 to R2 890 to slaughterhouses or their middlemen.
The average income for a farmer in the Sahel is R430.
Donkeys are also being targetted by criminals and owners need to tie them up at night in fenced enclosures near the family home.
Chinese remedies
As with other threatened species, it is the appetite of the Chinese population for puppet remedies, sexual stimulants and youth elixirs that is the cause of such cruelty.
It is estimated that annually four million donkey skins are transformed into gelatin.
This is used as an ingredient for cosmetics or consumables under the generic name Ejiao.
The so-called best brands of Ejiao sells for €12 000 per kilo.
According to Robin des Bois, owing to the urgency of saving the donkey and the power of the Ejiao industry, education of consumers will not serve any purpose.
The organisation suggests that while waiting for one united African political line on donkeys, each country needs its own animal protection law to convict donkey dealers and advises the Africa Union to address the issue of pillaging of the donkeys by Chinese industrialists and adopt strict common measures to ban the export of domestic donkeys and increase the laws governing the protection of wild donkeys.
The African wild donkey (Equus africanus), of whom a few hundred individuals survive in Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia, is listed since 1983 in Appendix I on the CITES Convention (1).
International trade in live specimens or their parts is banned.
Domestic African donkeys (Equus asinus) are not covered by the ban and this needs to be addressed so that they are also protected from international trade.
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