Governments are seeking to curb donkey skin exports to China, where demand for traditional medicine and other products is threatening animals that rural households need.
For years, Chinese companies and their contractors have been slaughtering millions of donkeys across Africa, coveting gelatin from the animals’ hides that is processed into traditional medicines, popular sweets and beauty products in China.
But a growing demand for the gelatin has decimated donkey populations at such alarming rates in African countries that governments are now moving to put a brake on the mostly unregulated trade.
The African Union, a body that encompasses the continent’s 55 states, adopted a continentwide ban on donkey skin exports this month in the hope that stocks will recover.
Rural households across Africa rely on donkeys for transportation and agriculture.
Yet donkeys only breed a foal every couple of years.
“A means of survival in Africa fuels the demand for luxury products from the middle class in China,” said Emmanuel Sarr, who heads the West Africa regional office of Brooke, a nongovernment organization based in London that works to protect donkeys and horses.
“This cannot continue.”
many countries in this region have no enforceable protections for animals at all. hunters in america know this well enough. they fly over and kill pretty much whatever they want, and then sell the meat to a local fence.
the jesus types view the idea that humans can do harm to the environment as blasphemy, because it implies that god is not in complete control of nature. i’ve never met a hunter that wasn’t an uneducated belligerent dick.