What is it with the Chinese and their wacky "traditional" medicines and beauty treatments? Not content with decimating a whole raft of endangered species in the interests of unproven health remedies and skin treatments, it seems they are also intent on slaughtering vast numbers of the world's donkeys for an obscure collagen treatment made out of donkey skin.
Why donkey skin in particular? Don't ask me. And does it actually work? Also don't ask me (although I have my suspicions). But the Chinese seem convinced that donkey skin can slow ageing, enhance beauty, boost the libido, and cure a whole host of ailments from anemia to insomnia to pregnancy issues.
Ejiao (a collagen extracted from donkey hides) now sells for $780 per kilogram, and is sold in China in the form of cakes, tablets, bars and liquids. It is no longer a remedy reserved for Chinese royalty; it is a must-have for its huge upwardly-mobile middle class. Demand for donkey skin from China is insatiable. It is a $7.8 billion market, and has doubled in just the last few years, largely due to intensive advertising campaigns by Chinese companies. China consumes about 5 million donkey skins annually, and depletes about 10% of the entire world population of donkeys each year.
Anyway, you say, it's only donkeys, right? No-one really cares about donkeys, and it sure as hell isn't an endangered species, right? Well, donkeys are certainly not endangered, but it's not true that no-one cares about them. And I don't just mean because they're cute, and because you may have contributed to a donkey sanctuary while on a sunshine holiday at some point in your life.
The thing is, China has blown through its own supply of donkeys, once the largest in the world, and it now sources its donkey hides abroad, largely from Africa. Donkeys are the workhorse of much of Africa, and the continent is now home to nearly two-thirds of the world's donkeys. They are used to carry, water, food and farm goods. They boost household productivity, and free up their children to go to school.
The global trade in donkeys is completely unregulated, and an estimated 25-35% of China's imported donkeys are now stolen or trafficked illegally. The sharp recent increase in the price of donkey hides has attracted transnational criminal networks, and traffickers are easily evading the bans that some countries have instituted. Donkeys are slow to reproduce, and are hard to breed in large numbers; some African countries like Botswana have lost half of their donkey population since 2016.
Many African villages are suffering greatly as a result of the Chinese trade and, as usual, women and girls are suffering most, especially as they are often drafted in to do the work that donkeys used to do. The donkeys themselves are also suffering, often walked for days to market without adequate food or water, and often killed cruelly, with a hammer or dagger. The slaughtering process is unhygienic and creates a risk of the transmission of infectious diseases across the globe.
There is really little or nothing to recommend the trade in donkeys for Chinese consumption. The demand is the instigator of all these problems, and mass-market advertising on Chinese television is at the root of it. It's hard to know who to dislike most: the rapacious advertisers, the blasé authorities, or the vain and gullible consumers.
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