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To sell water and make his living, Steve relied completely on his donkeys. They pulled him in his cart loaded with its 20 jerry cans to all his customers. When Steve’s donkeys were stolen for their skins, he could no longer work.
That day started like most others. In the morning, he left his home in the outskirts of Nairobi and went to the field to get his animals.
“I couldn’t see them,” he recalls. “I searched all day, all night and the following day.” It was three days later that he got a call from a friend telling him he had found the animals’ skeletons. “They’d been killed, slaughtered, their skin was not there.”
Donkey thefts like this have become increasingly common across many parts of Africa – and in other parts of the world that have large populations of these working animals. Steve – and his donkeys – are collateral damage in a controversial global trade in donkey skin.
Its origins are thousands of miles from that field in Kenya. In China, a traditional medicinal remedy that is made with the gelatin in donkey skin is in high demand. It is called Ejiao.
It is believed to have health-enhancing and youth-preserving properties. Donkey skins are boiled down to extract the gelatin, which is made into powder, pills or liquid, or is added to food.
Campaigners against the trade say that people like Steve –
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