Lobby calls for firmer laws on donkey skin trade

By Steve Umidha

The rate of donkey slaughter in Kenya is staggering at 5.1 per cent against a reproduction of 1.04 per cent, meaning that the country is slaughtering its donkeys five times more than it is able to reproduce.

It is now feared that if this trend continues – without government’s speedy intervention, then donkeys will be extinct by the year 2023.

Available figures show that about 1,000 of the domesticated member of the horse family are being butchered every day across the 4 slaughter houses across the country.

It is against this backdrop that Brooke, a UK-based charity organization, and which focuses on the welfare and care of donkeys, horses and mules is now calling for an immediate world-wide ban on the export of donkey skins to China, saying that donkeys could be wiped out in four years if the trade is not stopped.

“In the last three years alone, according to a research undertaken in collaboration with KALRO, shows that we are slaughtering our donkeys five times more than we are able to reproduce, it is worrying and it is the reason we feel the government needs to step up to tame this trend – or we risk losing our donkeys in three years,” said Fred Ochieng’ BROOKE’s regional director, in an exclusive interview.

Ochieng’ feels that the current set of laws and regulations have done little to curb the widespread vice, particularly the donkey skin trade with China a key beneficiary from the trade that is valued at Sh1.72billion.

One donkey skin is sold in a Chinese market for about Sh50, 000, against Sh8, 000 or Sh10, 000 the original price of a breathing donkey. The donkey skins are being used to make gelatin for a product called ejiao, a product that has been used as a traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years.

“The trade in donkey skin should be banned as well as the smuggling of donkeys into this country from Tanzania and Ugandan markets and Kenya is at the epicenter of this trade, it is a crisis,” he says.

The international lobby group will for the next two days beginning Tuesday host a regional conference on donkey skin trade in Nairobi whose content will consider several aspects of the donkey skin trade which are a global issue of concern to Brooke and a crisis in Kenya now.

Recent dialogues and conversation with IGAD as well as the Government of Kenya have proposed a regional approach to address the issue of donkey skin trade, culminating in the event that kicks off tomorrow and will look to have deeper conversations with all stakeholders including donkey owners, government and community-based institutions.

But Brooke official also thinks the government has not been protective in terms of exclusion of the trade.

“I think frankly speaking if the government was concerned about its people, this trade would have been closed by now. I do not think the government has been supportive,” he says adding that, one of the options by the organization will be to have the animal classified as a working animal among other initiatives aimed at protecting our donkeys.

Other ares of concern will include the protection and conservation of donkeys both as work animals and a species, the socio-economic impacts of the donkey skin trade on donkey owning communities and service beneficiaries, animal welfare, disease control and environmental consideration (including environmental impacts of slaughter operations and compliance.

Other will include policy and legislation implications at regional and national levels including movement of animals and cross border aspects and compliance issues, donkey skin trade in the lenses of culture and religion as well as linkages between illegal donkey skin trade and other types of criminality including wildlife crime.