KRISTIN HUGO: ‘In China, African donkeys are a source for a trendy, supposedly medicinal product, and the animals are losing their skins, and lives, for it. At donkey slaughterhouses, workers kill and skin donkeys, then dump their bodies in a pile or bury them. They take the skins and boil them down, extracting the gelatin from them to make it into a product called ejiao, which has the consisetency of thick Jell-O.
China buys ejiao, which has traditionally be used for it’s supposed blood-circulation benefits, but recently has been marketed as a general wellness product. In the last decade, traditional Chinese medicine company Dong-e-e-jiao, has aggressively marketed their donkey-gelatin product, processing a million of the animals per year…
National Geographic reported… an account from a representative of the South African SPCA, who reported that 70 donkeys waiting to be skinned in a corral was the worst animal welfare violation she had ever seen. Emaciated donkeys picked through trash, some too weak to stand, many infected with herpes. Donkeys don’t often carry pregnancies to term under stress, and the representative found 19 aborted donkey fetuses on the ground’. SOURCE…
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