By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Every few years the Chinese fixate upon an animal and come to the conclusion that its parts will cure everything from acne to cancer. It doesn’t matter where the animal is; it could be the Totoaba, a fish found only in one lake in Mexico, which is almost totally decimated because the Chinese wanted its swim bladder.

It could be the hair from the nose of a rhino (one species of the rhino has become completely extinct this year and there are a few hundred left of the other), the pancreas of the Indian bear, the pangolin whose scales are used by the Chinese to cure “excessive nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness”.

The Chinese have finished entire species in dozens of countries including India. India’s tiger and shark poaching is due to their greed for the parts. Africa’s elephants are almost gone and Australia loses millions of native birds to Chinese fetishes for keeping caged birds. Dried abalone, a status food that can sell for more than $90 per pound in China, forms the nucleus of a criminal economy worth millions each year in South Africa, with documented links to money laundering and the drug trade.

Now it is the turn of the donkey. Donkey hide gelatine, obtained by soaking and stewing the skin of a donkey, is used as a new ingredient in “old” Chinese medicine. It is called ejiao. The gelatine is sold in 3-4 inch rectangular or square blocks. It is hard and brittle, brown and shiny, translucent and slightly sweet — as dried glue is.

It is supposed to enrich the blood (whatever that means), strengthen bones, and cure dizziness, anaemia, palpitations, insomnia, cancer and prevent miscarriages, stop bleeding and dry coughs, help the liver lung and kidneys, fatigue, chronic diarrhoea, phobias, obsessions, compulsions and excessive anxiety. The Chinese also eat donkey glue as a snack bar mixed with nuts and seeds.

According to a 1723 account by the French Jesuit Dominique Parrenin, ejiao was only made for the emperor’s court from the skin of a freshly killed well-nourished black donkey. Since black donkeys were, even then, in short supply a large amount of “fake” ejiao was also manufactured, using skins from mules, horses, camels, pigs, and even old shoes. Since what it was supposed to cure was equally vague, I am sure it worked well.

The earliest known historical record of ejiao gelatine is in the ancient Chinese medical document entitled Shen Nong’s Materia Medica, made during the Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206-220 AD) dynasties. In that document, ejiao is made from any animal skin. The Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China (the 1990, 1995 and 2000 editions), however, refers to donkey-hide gelatine as the only certified ejiao product. And businessmen picked this up. In the 1990s ejiao was rebranded as a consumer item and beauty product, causing sales — and demand for donkey skins — to skyrocket.

Millions of donkeys were immediately killed in China. Their population took a steep dive. In ten years donkey prices began to rise steeply around the world. African countries found they had no donkeys left. Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal have banned donkey exports to China. Has it stopped donkeys being killed? No. Donkey skins have become a hot commodity on the black market, and wildlife traffickers have moved in. Agents of the Chinese go from village to village, steal animals at night and strip their skins off on the spot. In November 2017, eyewitness footage showing baby donkeys being bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers, or killed by having their throats cut.

Has India escaped this illegal poaching? When was the last time you saw a donkey? At last count we were down by 40 per cent of our donkeys, a massacre of over 3 million in just the last two years.

With the decimation of the donkey, many rural communities in Africa and South America have lost their livelihoods for a product no one needs. The price of donkeys has risen steeply in some countries, making them unaffordable for people who use them to take goods to market, cultivate land, and fetch water. The cost of a donkey in Burkina Faso, for example, has increased from £60 in 2014 to £108 in 2016. In Niger, the price has climbed from $34 to $145. In Kenya, the prices are even higher.

The Chinese pay $48 per skin, making it very lucrative to break all the laws. South Africa allows the export of a maximum of 7,300 donkey skins a year. Yet, when the police investigated just one firm, they found they had exported 15,000 in less than a year. Firms in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon are openly advertising donkey skins – as well as pangolins whose international trade is forbidden. The Chinese buy both from the same firms.

Efforts are on by the Chinese to start donkey slaughterhouses in Pakistan and Australia.

Even though the Chinese know that most of these skins are from the black market, on January 1, 2017 the Chinese government brought down import duties on donkey hide from 5 per cent to 2 per cent. Dong EE-Jiao is the largest company in China and handled 7 lakh donkey hides in 2014, increasing to one million in 2018. Its profits were $295 million in 2016.

Ten years ago there were approximately 44 million donkeys spread over Asia, Africa and South America. Ten years from now, they will be down to less than a million. As of today, countries that have counted their donkeys report this: Botswana down by 70 per cent. Kyrgyzstan and India, down by 40 per cent, Columbia and Brazil down by 15 per cent.

Why have the Chinese been allowed to carry out this genocide?

(To join the animal welfare movement contact [email protected], www.peopleforanimalsindia.org)