In Kenya, donkeys are being slaughtered in their droves for the rampant and insatiable Chinese donkey-skin trade. Despite a legal ban on murdering these gentle creatures, they are being massacred as you read this.
In 2021, with your help, we successfully helped end the brutal trade in Tanzania after the government heeded our pleas to ban it. Now, we ask you to stand with us – to achieve the same victory in Kenya, where hapless donkeys continue to be cruelly and illegally killed. Kenya recently passed a law prohibiting the slaughter of donkeys in the country, but it continues unabated. Police rarely intervene.
During a recent trip to Ndeiya in Kiambu County, Kenya, we discovered the fresh, bloody carcasses of around 500 donkeys, all brutally stripped of their skins and discarded on a hilly, rocky landscape to rot.
The Ndeiya region is an epicentre of donkey slaughter in Kenya and it is there that we ventured with our partner, the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (KSPCA).
At one location alone, approximately 500 donkey carcasses littered the ground like rubbish, discarded after they had been skinned, and every last bit of flesh and meat stripped from their bodies.
Donkeys are bought from markets or stolen from villages, and Chinese slaughterhouse owners may pay local people a pittance to slaughter the animals. The skins are then exported to China, where the gelatin is extracted and used in phony beauty products.
What is the price of a donkey’s life?
The meat of a single butchered donkey – often fed to unsuspecting people – can fetch around $150 (£117) in Kenya. The skin they are so gruesomely stripped is often sold for a paltry $50 (£39).
Tragically, this is not the worst or even most horrific case of donkey slaughter we have seen – and without your support right now, it will certainly not be the last.
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In the past decade, close to ONE MILLION donkeys have been killed in order to extract gelatin from their skin and make a substance called ejiao, a key ingredient in a Chinese cosmetic that has zero proven benefit.
Not only are donkeys needlessly killed, but in order to save money, the slaughter method is torture. They are bludgeoned with axes and hammers, their heads smashed in until they bleed out and die. Horrifically, they may even be skinned alive.
The Chinese donkey skin trade has ignited an ongoing and uncontrollable genocide of donkeys in Africa.
We have a plan to protect the animals and help bring the trade to its knees.
Help us to take action by donating today!
If we can raise $10,000 (roughly £7,900), we can equip our team on the ground with critically needed off-road motorbikes so they can patrol donkey slaughter hotspots, intercept illegal traders and rescue donkeys from a certain and brutal death.
Help us to take action by donating today!
These motorbikes will enable our team to regularly traverse the remote region that is largely inaccessible by car and where these heinous acts of cruelty would otherwise go unchecked. By increasing the frequency of patrols and expanding the areas covered, we can help significantly reduce the number of defenseless donkeys being slaughtered.
Gloria Davies, our CEO and founder, with rescued donkeys. With your help, we will defeat the donkey merchants of death.
Credit: NFA/David Barritt
We cannot stand by and allow this senseless slaughter to continue. We MUST take a stand – not tomorrow, not in a week, but right now.
Help us to take action by donating today!
The helpless donkeys of Africa desperately need the compassion of animal lovers like you. Can they count on you today? Please, donate right away.
