Transform the Donkey Industry through Understanding and Collaboration

An Interview with Mr. Mike Baker, CEO of the Donkey Sanctuary

“From my perspective, World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare has been a very successful and impressive conference. We have seen very rare commitment and impressive talks from governments, officials, prominent academics and people from the industry. The level of understanding and commitment to animal welfare is very impressive. It has been a very very encouraging couple of days. The International Cooperation Committee of Animal Welfare has done a great job. We have been very impressed by the openness of China and the approaches by organizations like ICCAW.”

According to Mr. Mike Baker, donkeys are wonderful species, being intelligent, friendly and curious. “They may look a little like horses, but they behave more like dogs.” In Devon, UK, where the Donkey Sanctuary is based, there are over 4000 donkeys that have been abused, abandoned or have nowhere to go cared for in sanctuaries. “We try to get them out to home, because we believe they will have a better life alongside people, small numbers of donkeys being cared by people. In the meantime, we help the donkeys. It’s incredible when you see the difference. A donkey in a very severe environment, in places like Egypt, carrying bricks. We estimate it to be about eighteen months before it is broken and unable to work anymore. Yet, the average age of the donkeys at the Donkey Sanctuary is 33. We actually have one donkey that is 54 years old. So they can live a long time.”

“There are about fifty million working donkeys, and hundreds of millions of people depend on these animals for their livelihoods, for collection of water and wood, the whole transport structure.” As for the welfare issues for working donkeys, the donkeys can become stressed through overwork, lack of feed, bad saddles. “Most people that depend on the donkeys are desperately poor. They have to work the animals very hard to make a living, but the donkeys become killed or injured. Actually, it’s very rare for people to be deliberately cruel or harmful to their donkeys. It’s simply either a lack of knowledge, or more often, people don’t have money or resources to care for them. That’s where we can help. In terms of working donkeys, it’s perfectly all right for donkeys to work and have good welfare. I have witnessed a lot of donkeys transformed from being sick, malnourished and hard-starved to happy healthy working donkeys after we have been working alongside the community. The donkey owners are also very happy, making more money, but also caring for the animals. I’m not an optimist person by nature, but I believe we can make a massive transformative impact for donkeys across the world.”

As the largest equine charity in the world, the Donkey Sanctuary works in almost forty countries all over the world to help improve donkey welfare. “Anywhere where the donkeys are, you will find the Donkey Sanctuary.” The Donkey Sanctuary works in partnership with local communities and helps care for the donkeys to benefit both people and animals by promoting understanding of the animals, providing expertise and helping set up infrastructure to support the animals, for example, training people to make saddles and put shoes on donkeys.

However, the recent explosion of the donkey skin market has become a real concern. As the population of donkeys becomes smaller in China, donkey skins have to be imported from across the world. “The sheer scale is causing difficulties to local communities, some of which have lost their entire herd of animals. People are stealing donkeys, because they are so expensive. The trade is often done by people illegally or in an unregulated way. We have seen people bludgeon the animals, starve them, making it easier to skin them. As a result of that, many governments have taken action to ban the trade all together because they fear they will lose their donkeys. We can understand why the Chinese industry would like to build donkey farming industry. I think that would be a more sensible solution to the current situation.”

However, donkey farming can be time-consuming and challenging. “It would take many many donkeys and quite a few years to build the number that would actually satisfy the industry supply. Donkeys are rarely farmed on a mass scale as donkeys are not an easy animal to farm. They produce one donkey at a time. It takes over a year for that donkey to come. It takes three or four years to come to maturity. So it’s not a quick or easy process. Donkeys also do not like being in very confined places. In crowded situations, donkeys can become very stressed. Stress can actually disorder or even kill the donkeys. It’s a very serious issue. In China, it’s probably the first attempt to farm donkeys on this scale. We are keen to be engaged with the industry to make sure that welfare is embedded. We have worked with the donkey milk industry, for example, in Italy, produce standards and guidelines by working with the industry. That can lead to good welfare in farming. We would be keen to discuss with the donkey farming industry growing in China.”

Mr. Mike Baker also suggests alternative methods, like developing donkey collagen in laboratories. “In laboratory, that’s actually quite simple. People often grow human skin, or at least, key parts of human skin in laboratories, and using that for testing. So that’s perfectly feasible to do that with donkey skin, grow it in laboratories quite cheaply on a mass scale. That would be genuine donkey skin, then genuine donkey collagen, which is the main ingredient of ‘ejiao’. It potentially could resolve the whole issue. It would allow the industry to get what it need. It would allow the humans to get what they need, but without causing any harm to the donkeys. The beauty of the alternative is that, it wouldn’t replace the product. The product would remain the same. But the way you get the ingredient would change. That can be done on a reasonably large scale, provide a steady supply without harming animals, and without all the problems of farming.”

Mr. Mike Baker hopes to raise awareness of issues around donkeys, particularly around donkey skin trade, and understand the situations of donkeys in China so as to find out the best way to help the donkeys. “We want to constructively engage with the industry in a positive way. The problems we see are problems of the industry as well. Hopefully, we can work together to deal with that.”