Global awareness and concern over international wildlife trade and trafficking foregrounds a select few emblematic species, such as elephants, tigers, rhinos, and pangolins. 

Within this narrow constellation of ‘headline species’, less ‘iconic’ animals can be overlooked and unprotected. For example, the critically endangered European eel, despite it currently being the most trafficked animal in the world.

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Our case in point is the donkey: often dismissed as a lower-status, labour animal. They also bear the weight of a growing, voracious and clandestine trade.

Farming

This is a trade that operates in the shadows and yet is responsible for the slaughter of millions of donkeys each year - many stolen from rural communities who depend on donkeys for their livelihoods. 

It has turned donkey skin into an industrial commodity and unleashed a cascade of compounding harms.

The unprecedented scale of slaughter is driven by demand for ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine derived from gelatin in donkey skin. 

Currently experiencing a resurgence in demand due to perceived youth-preserving, health-improving effects, ejiao poses an existential threat to donkeys individually and as a species. 

Due to long gestation periods and complex health and welfare needs, donkeys are entirely unsuitable for farming, making this an animal protection issue on both an individual and species level. 

Relief

This trade triggers interrelated harms across biosecurity, biodiversity, and livelihoods.

When donkeys lack visibility, so do the needs of the people who rely on them as a lifeline in low-income and marginalised regions. 

Donkeys carry food, water and medicines to rural households and people, produce and products to market. Their efforts as working equids keep children - especially girls - in school and people - especially women - engaged in commercial activities. 

In many settings, the presence of a working donkey is a practical lever of poverty reduction and gender equality progress. 

Working donkeys provide direct and indirect income to millions of communities. They support resilience after disasters, helping with rescue, relief, and recovery. When a donkey is stolen, people suffer. 

Zoonotic

Hidden, hazardous and often operating without regulatory or veterinary oversight, the donkey skin trade gives rise to a range of downstream environmental consequences which threaten biodiversity. 

Slaughter often takes place in ‘backyard’ or ‘bush’ settings without access to appropriate hygiene facilities or safe waste management. 

This heightens the risk of contamination as blood, offal and wastewater can leach into surrounding soil, food supplies and water sources- a serious concern. 

This process can operate through organised criminal groups, often working through the night to capture, slaughter and skin donkeys, leaving their carcasses to rot.

The trade’s opportunistic, loosely regulated supply chain creates systemic biosecurity vulnerabilities and elevates zoonotic disease risk. 

Biosecurity

Donkeys who are captured, bought or stolen are commingled, held and transported together, often across borders, before slaughtering. 

Bringing donkeys together from multiple countries where endemic diseases persist, with no reliable traceability or veterinary oversight, poses a serious risk of disease outbreak, affecting both donkeys and humans. 

The Donkey Sanctuary commissioned external expert research showing that donkey skins can present significant biosecurity risks. 

In a study of 108 skins sampled at a Kenyan slaughterhouse in 2020, 88 yielded Staphylococcus aureus; of these, 44 were confirmed methicillin-resistant (MRSA)- an antimicrobial-resistant strain of public‑health concern. 

Taken together, the findings indicate that untreated or inadequately processed hides present a biosecurity hazard which drives the risk of preventable health threats at the human animal interface. This makes the donkey skin trade a growing ‘One Health’ threat. 

Mistreatment

The donkey skin trade does not operate in isolation. It sits within a wider illicit economy where multiple trades intersect. 

Because its legal status varies between countries and no international framework governs it, the trade creates cover for the movement of CITES listed wildlife and enables associated crimes such as money laundering, narcotics trafficking and the illicit arms trade. 

The co-mingling of donkey skins with other wildlife parts amplifies the risk of pathogen spill-over in shared supply chains. 

These skins are a ‘trojan horse’ to disguise and deflect. In this way, the trade functions as an enabler of serious organised crime and a multiplier of biosecurity threats.

This is a trade built on systemic mistreatment and abuse. Profound suffering runs throughout the supply chain. 

Traditional

Once sourced, donkeys may be driven on foot hundreds of miles in extreme heat, often without adequate food or water; many do not survive the journey. 

Those that do not are skinned on the spot, those that do are confined in overcrowded holding pens - at one Kenyan slaughterhouse (2019), dead and dying animals with open wounds were observed. 

The slaughter itself is frequently carried out in view of other donkeys and in breach of internationally agreed humane‑slaughter standards, making extreme pain and fear routine at the point of killing. 

The donkey‑skin trade is a highly complex issue rooted in demand based on traditional practices. As with wildlife trafficking, climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, there is a time-critical dimension. 

Political

The global donkey population is estimated at 50 million, with the trade consuming at least six million animals each year, a long-overlooked and undervalued species risks being driven toward population collapse. 

This is why The Donkey Sanctuary works globally with Governments and partners to raise the visbility of donkeys in policy and call for an end to the donkey skin trade. 

In 2024, African Heads of State announced a moratorium on the slaughter of donkeys for their skins across the continent. A strategy has since been confirmed that will help safeguard donkeys across Africa and implement wider protections by 2035. 

Meanwhile, demand for donkey skins extends into other regions, from Asia to Latin and Central America, where similar coordinated political action is needed. 

Protect

In Brazil, in three decades, the country’s donkey population has collapsed by 94 per cent – falling from 1.37 million animals in 1996 to fewer than 78,000. 

Some scientists warn that the species faces extinction if slaughter continues unchecked. The way forward involves engagement with parliamentarians on protective policies and collaboration with scientists. 

The Donkey Sanctuary partners with experts to understand trade routes, develop real-time intel, and understand the complex dynamics of demand and opportunities for systemic industry change. 

To protect donkeys, those who rely upon them and planetary health, ongoing coordinated action at pace is needed from all agencies engaged in tackling this trade.

These Authors

Esme Primrose Wheeler is the public affairs manager at The Donkey Sanctuary. Frances Goodrum is head of public affairs at The Donkey Sanctuary.