Donkey Welfare Initiative
Defend Them All works with advocates and organizations seeking stronger protections for donkeys in law, policy, education, and public advocacy. Through this initiative, we examine the conditions affecting working and domesticated donkeys, the global donkey skin trade, gaps in existing legal frameworks, and the need for humane alternatives to products made from donkey hide.
Donkeys are among the most widely used and least protected animals in the world. Their suffering is often treated as inevitable, invisible, or secondary to the human systems that depend on them. DTA’s work starts from a different premise: donkeys are individual animals with their own interests, needs, and capacity to suffer, and their protection should not depend on whether they are economically useful.
About the Donkey Welfare Initiative
Donkeys are a distinct species, Equus asinus, adapted to hot, dry, and resource-limited environments. Their capacity to endure has too often been mistaken for an ability to withstand neglect, overwork, and inadequate care. They are intelligent, attentive, and emotionally responsive animals that form lasting bonds with people and other animals. They experience pain, fear, fatigue, and distress.
An estimated 40 to 50 million donkeys live across six continents. Many are working animals in low- and middle-income countries, where they support agriculture, transportation, water access, and household livelihoods. Others live as companions in countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, while some live in feral populations largely outside direct human management.
In many parts of the world, donkeys are being replaced by motorized vehicles and farm machinery as economies industrialize. In China, where donkeys were once kept primarily as working animals, the mechanization of agriculture has driven an 85 percent collapse in the donkey population since the mid-1990s. As their economic utility as working animals has declined, they have increasingly been valued instead for their hides and meat. Today, an estimated six million donkeys — and potentially more — are killed each year to supply the global ejiao trade, a 160 percent increase in production over just the past five years.
Why it Matters
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Donkeys have worked alongside humans since approximately 5000 BCE — roughly 3,000 years before the horse. Yet despite their long history of service to humans, donkeys remain poorly protected in law. Classified as livestock, working animals, or property, they are treated primarily as economic assets rather than as individuals capable of suffering. In many countries, donkeys are excluded from national livestock surveys entirely — making population declines invisible to policymakers and welfare problems invisible to law. Most jurisdictions lack species-specific welfare standards for working equids, and general anti-cruelty laws tend to intervene only after suffering has become severe, visible, and documentable — leaving many donkeys without meaningful protection until harm has already occurred. As a result, many working donkeys endure excessive loading, poorly fitted harnesses, untreated wounds, lameness, inadequate nutrition, and prolonged work in extreme conditions.
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The global trade in donkey skins for the production of ejiao has intensified the risks donkeys face. Ejiao is a gelatin made from donkey hides and used in traditional Chinese medicine, cosmetics, and other consumer products. Growing demand for ejiao has expanded the international donkey-skin trade, including sales in the United States, and has driven up hide prices, incentivizing slaughter and theft rather than herd rebuilding. demand has increased, sourcing has expanded beyond China into Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Donkeys may be stolen, transported long distances, handled roughly, held without adequate food, water, or rest, and slaughtered under poorly regulated or inhumane conditions.Estimates suggest that the trade requires about 5.9 million donkey skins each year, though exact global figures remain difficult to verify.
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Domesticated donkeys are not protected under international wildlife trade conventions in the way many threatened wild species are. In most legal systems, they are treated broadly as livestock, working animals, or property. Those classifications were built around production and commerce, not around the distinct welfare needs of donkeys.
Agricultural exemptions can narrow anti-cruelty enforcement. Transport and slaughter rules often fail to account for donkey-specific risks. Trade data can be difficult to track. Together, these gaps create the conditions in which harmful working practices and the donkey skin trade can persist with limited accountability.
Our Approach
DTA works through community advocacy, education, and legal guidance. For donkeys, that means:
Working alongside advocates and organizations already advancing donkey welfare internationally, including collaboration to develop an educational curriculum for children centered on donkey wellbeing, behavior, and humane treatment.
Conducting legal and policy analysis in the United States and Canada — monitoring legislative developments, identifying gaps in existing frameworks, and exploring opportunities for stronger, species-specific protections at the local, state or provincial, and federal level.
Conducting field-based research in Latin America to better understand working conditions, enforcement realities, and future advocacy pathways.
Building public understanding of ejiao, the products that contain it, and the case for humane alternatives that do not depend on donkey suffering.
