The donkey business

The road leading to tanneries in Din Garh and godowns of raw hides in Kasur city gives a different look. One can see police pickets set up at small distances. Police officials thoroughly examine every vehicle approaching there. The policemen ask drivers, who are carrying raw hides, to let them take a closer look at their vehicles.

The police is also checking other private vehicles, asking the passengers to come out. They remove mats of the cars, look out for something in the trunk, and also look right under the frames of the cars with the help of search lights.

No, they are not looking for explosives or illegal weapons. In fact, they are in search of raw donkey hides which might be brought to this place from different parts of Punjab.

It has been observed that people travel with their family members in cars, carrying donkey hides hidden in different places, to dodge policemen.

This is not the first time that such hides are being transported to Din Garh where they are processed into leather for local use or preserved in raw form for transportation to China, Vietnam, Hong Kong and some other countries.

However, the difference now is that most of the hides are of donkeys that are stolen and slaughtered for their hides, fetching good prices in the international market. This activity is illegal. Slaughtering of any animal without prior inspection and approval of veterinary doctors, and carried outside an official slaughterhouse is violation of the Punjab Animal Slaughter Control Act, 1963.

Slaughtering of donkey is also illegal as this activity has not been allowed in this law.

"A ban on the export of donkey hides has been announced till the time proper mechanism is devised to monitor this activity," says Jameel who wants to be identified by his second name only. Based in Kasur, he says, for years he has collected donkey hides, along with those of other animals, for sale to stockists of hides and leather tanneries. "The only legal way to get a donkey hide is to buy it from local government contractors who pay a fee to get the possession of dead animals."

Jameel tells TNS that the hides of donkeys that die a natural death reach Din Garh in a legal manner. Many of these are exported to China where their extract is used in traditional medicine, especially the globally popular Ejiao, also known as donkey-hide gelatine. Ejiao is known to have anti-ageing and blood-purifying qualities and its consumption reportedly removes wrinkles, tightens the skin, and improves complexion.

He informs that the demand for traditional Chinese medicine has increased all over the world which has led to the shortage of raw material. Besides, he says, "there is a dwindling donkey population due to excessive mechanisation in China. Therefore, a lot of people in Pakistan have started illegal slaughtering of donkeys to make easy money through their exports."

This activity was noticed by the customs authorities in Karachi, which in a letter written in May last to the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) -- their parent body -- had asked it to impose ban on export of donkey hides. The customs authorities had observed that 83,475 donkey hides had been exported to China from just one collectorate in one and a half years, and they had suspected the number would be much larger if exports from other collectorates or through wrong declarations were also taken into account.

What set off the alarm was the fact that the quarantine certificates issued by the quarantine authorities did not mention that carcasses had been appropriately disposed of.

Reports reveal that most of these exports originate from Kasur and Lahore hide markets and that these hides fetch prices between Rs 15,000 to Rs 25,000 per piece.

Sheikh Arshad, President Lahore Hide Market, does not agree with this claim. He says that the Lahore hide market is not dealing in donkey hides. "Kasur is the hub as most tanneries of the region are situated there. Even the hides of cows, goats, etc, collected in Lahore are taken there for processing.".

"Donkey hide would cost between Rs 200 and Rs 400 in the local market some time back but now its price has sky-rocketed. In the local market, its only considerable use is in shoe-making industry (for making soles of khussas, etc) but once exported to China it becomes a major ingredient of the high-in-demand anti-ageing and energy-boosting medicine," he adds.

Read also: Donkey-carts: Wheels of labour

Arshad supports the ban as he thinks that many poor people, whose survival depends on their donkeys, are being deprived of their most important movable asset by thieves and poachers. He says there were incidents where donkeys of poor villagers were injected with poison and dragged away during the dark of the night to a place for skinning.

A Punjab government official, privy to these developments, tells TNS on the condition of withholding his name that the ban is supposed to stay until a proper mechanism for disposal of carcasses is developed. "What happens at the moment is that the carcasses of dead animals are buried, sold to factories for extraction of fats which are used in sub-standard ghee and cosmetics or cut into meat for sale in the market.

Even the confiscated sub-standard meat of halal animals, he says, is buried, thrown into the river or sprinkled with phenyl to make it inedible. The official says that ideally carcasses should be disposed of through incinerators but this happens rarely. "There is only one working incinerator, at the government slaughter house in Shahpur Kanjran, Lahore, which cannot cater to the needs of the whole province," he adds.

The official believes much more will have to be done to check smuggling and export of donkey hides. "If live animals can be smuggled across the borders, why can’t the hide?"

Nasim Sadiq, Secretary Livestock, Punjab, tells TNS that it was on the complaint of the Punjab government that the federal government announced this ban, which will be notified shortly. He says they have observed on the basis of surveys conducted by the livestock department, that equine (donkeys, horses, mules, etc,) population has plummeted by 70 per cent in the province since the last livestock census. They have written to the federal government that this population of equines will further decrease if proper steps are not taken in time.

He tells TNS that there was an impression earlier that machines and vehicles would replace donkeys as an economical mode of transport of goods. Due to this perception, he says, many people lost interest in breeding and rearing donkeys. Their smuggling, along with other animals, across the Pak-Afghan border also resulted in a fall in their numbers. The worst, he says, is the ruthless slaughtering of donkeys for the export of hides and the sale of their meat.

Sadiq says the demand for donkeys is increasing in the country as machines and vehicles cannot reach the places where they can. He says a huge number of donkeys will be required during the building of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). On the basis of these demand projections, "the government is devising policies and taking steps to take the number of these animals to the required level."

He adds that the department has taken urine samples of donkeys and camels to find out the nature of diseases among them. "The government would carry out vaccinations and provide the required medicine to decrease morbidity among these animals which are mostly owned by people living under subsistence level."

While the government is mulling measures to safeguard donkey population, an interesting development is that some people have launched paid parking for donkeys. The owners of the dreaded donkeys can park them there for a fee.