Donkeys stolen, skinned to feed Chinese demand
NAIROBI, Kenya — Dawn was just beginning to break when Joseph Kamonjo Kariuki woke to find his donkeys missing. The villager searched the bush frantically for the animals he depends on to deliver water for a living, but they were nowhere to be found.
It was the village’s children who led Kariuki to the ghastly remains: three bloody, severed donkey heads lying on the ground.
“I was in shock,” said Kariuki, 37, who is known in his Kenyan village of Naivasha as “Jose wa Mapunda” — “Joseph of the Donkeys” in Swahili.
Kariuki believes his donkeys were the latest victims of a black market for donkey skins, the key ingredient in a Chinese health fad that’s threatening the beasts of burden many Africans rely on for farm work and transporting heavy loads.
From Kenya to Burkina Faso, Egypt to Nigeria, animal rights groups say, agents are seeking to feed China’s insatiable appetite for a gelatin they call ejiao, made from stewed donkey skins that purports to provide health benefits.
Shrinking donkey herds in China have driven ejiao producers to seek out donkey skins from Africa, Australia and South America, threatening the world’s donkey population and driving violent crime and protests across Africa, the activists say.
Kariuki founded a protest group “Tunza Punda Wako” or “Take Care of Your Donkey” in Swahili. They’ve picketed the abattoir in Naivasha, accusing it of driving the skin thefts.
“At this rate we will tell our children that donkeys once existed,” he said.
Fourteen African governments have banned the export of donkey skins, according to the British.-based animal welfare group Donkey Sanctuary.
In Kenya, the donkey population has fallen in the past nine years by a third — from 1.8 million to 1.2 million. Kenya’s three licensed slaughterhouses butcher 1,000 donkeys a day to supply skins to China, said Calvin Onyango, program development manager of the Donkey Sanctuary Kenya.
“We do not have many donkeys and most people do not want to sell their donkeys. So to keep supplying these slaughterhouses, we have ended up with businesspeople or brokers stealing other people’s donkeys to supply the slaughterhouses,” Onyango said.
Onyango said that the rate at which donkeys were being slaughtered meant that there could be none left in five years.
From Kenya, the donkey hides travel thousands of miles to China. Many of them end up in an eastern town called Dong’e, where most of the world’s ejiao is made.
On the road into Dong’e, billboard after billboard proclaims the purported curative powers of the gelatin.
“Ejiao, eat for a long life, lose weight, and get more energy,” reads a slogan printed on the side of a hotel dedicated to gelatin tourism.