Tragedy of the donkeys
QUESTION Are the world’s donkeys at risk?
There has been a rapid decline in the number of donkeys due to their demand in Chinese medicine.
Five million hides a year are needed to make ejiao, a 2,500-year-old remedy prepared with gelatin, which is made by boiling and stewing donkey skin.
It is used for the treatment of anaemia, dementia, infertility, respiratory problems, insomnia and excessive menstrual bleeding, as a boost for libido and as an ingredient in beauty products.
A donkey hide releases just 2.2 lb of the substance. Donkey meat is also a delicacy.
rapid industrialisation resulted in a decrease in China’s donkey population. The ensuing rise in value of ejiao saw widescale poaching across the globe. Donkey numbers in Brazil have declined by 28 per cent since 2007, in Botswana by 37 per cent and in Kyrgyzstan by 53 per cent.
Syndicates have even been stealing donkeys from farms to supply Chinese middlemen. The theft of donkeys in Africa can be devastating for a village, where they can be vital for transporting goods.
The stolen animals are kept in awful conditions. A report by The Donkey Sanctuary suggests up to 20 per cent of them die en route to the slaughterhouse. The charity reports poor treatment by handlers, broken legs are commonplace and there have been sightings of severed hooves and lower legs at offloading sites.
Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal have banned donkey exports to China. Kenya, which was losing 1,000 animals a day, has announced a ban on donkey slaughter.
Mrs S. P. Oliver, Hoddesdon, Herts.
QUESTION Why did the writer Eric Blair change his name to George Orwell?
The author of Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-Four never cared for his birth name: he found eric too Norse and Blair too Scottish. In 1936, his wife eileen wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish & dull.’
Before the publication of his first long work, the two-part memoir Down And Out In Paris And London, Blair wrote to his agent Leonard Moore: ‘I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.’ In November 1932, he was sent galley proofs of the book and was surprised to see that his publisher had simply called him ‘X’.
Unimpressed, Blair drew up a list of four pseudonyms, telling Moore: ‘A name I always use when tramping is P. S. Burton . . . but what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell or h. Lewis Allways? I rather favour George Orwell.’
This was duly chosen. The book was a great success — the first edition sold out in a month — and the name stuck.
It’s thought the name was inspired by the lovely river Orwell that runs 11 miles through Suffolk.
It took on a life of its own in the word Orwellian, a term relating to the dystopian reality depicted in Nineteen eighty-Four. It’s fortunate he changed his name or we might have been using the term Blairism or Blairite to describe such a society.
Angela Mills, Canterbury, Kent.