Brooke East Africa, an animal welfare charity, has raised the alarm about the illegal slaughter of donkeys in the country.
This comes even as the four donkey abattoirs situated in Nakuru, Baringo, Turkana, and Machakos counties remain closed after the ministry of agriculture in 2019 held on to the licenses following complaints from donkey-owning communities who claimed their donkeys were being stolen due to the trade.
According to Brooke East Africa’s regional director, Dr. Raphael Kinoti, the government should put a total ban on the sale of donkey skin due to the lack of donkey numbers to support the trade.
“Donkeys in Kenya are kept for work and not for slaughter; if we slaughter donkeys for their skins, livelihoods are lost,” Dr. Kinoti noted.
In three years, that is, 2016–18, the four donkey abattoirs slaughtered 301,977 donkeys, which at the time represented 15.4 percent of the country’s donkey population, according to the 2019 Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization report, The Status of Donkey Slaughter for Skin Trade and Its Implications on the Kenyan Economy.
In its report, KALRO further projected that Kenya would be slaughtering the last of her donkey species this year if the slaughter continued, down from 1,965,632 donkeys as of 2016, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock.
According to Dr. Kinoti, there is a need for the government to put up a policy that will speak for the African donkeys, highlighting the illegal donkey slaughter for their skins since donkeys bail out the donkey-owning hustlers.
“The incoming government is a hustler government, as donkeys help lots of hustlers, and slaughtering them for skins only subjects the donkey-owning hustler to abject poverty,” Dr. Kinoti added.
According to the KALRO report, on average, each working donkey earns an average of Ksh. 11,390 per month, with Dr. Kinoti saying that the government should allocate resources at the national and county levels to address welfare issues affecting donkeys so that they can continue generating revenues for the country.
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