The Ejiao Act of 2023
Please contact your Representative in the House and ask them to cosponsor the Ejiao Act (H.R. 6021). Call the Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or send them an email via the contact forms on their individual websites.
The Ejiao Act will ban the sale or transportation of ejiao, a gelatin made from boiling donkey skin, or products containing ejiao in interstate or foreign commerce.
Millions of donkeys are brutally slaughtered to make ejiao (pronounced: eh-gee-yow) primarily for beauty products and Chinese medicine. Once a luxury item reserved for China’s elites, ejiao is now sold to the country’s growing middle class. Unable to keep up with ravenous demand domestically, Chinese traders take donkeys wherever they can get them. This makes American donkeys and burros targets of kill buyers for shipping to slaughter. Populations have plummeted in countries in South America and Africa, hurting poor communities that depend on their work animals for survival. Given their slow gestation period and growth to maturity, some breeds are facing extinction.
Philip Mshelia, an equine veterinarian and researcher at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria describes what the animals suffer:
“After buying donkeys at markets, traders often drive large herds to slaughter, sometimes covering hundreds of kilometers with no rest, food, or water. Those transported by truck fare worse: Handlers tie their legs together and sling them onto piles or strap them to the top of the truck, Mshelia says. Animals that survive the journey—many with broken or severed limbs—are unloaded by the ears and tails and tossed in front of a slaughterhouse. Some meet their end in an open field where humans await them with hammers, axes, and knives.”
(Donkeys Face Worldwide Existential Threat | Science Magazine | 13 December 2019)
Incomprehensibly, donkeys, burros, mules, and hinnies are victims of negative stereotypes when they are, in fact, extremely intelligent and sensitive. As you have seen at Skydog, it is hard to walk through a donkey herd without each one insisting on a kiss and a scratch behind the ears. Waldo, Firefly, Boots, Flopsy & Fufu, the Peanuts Gang and the babies, Woodstock, Marcie Marshmallow, and Forest, are the most gentle, loving beings with a passion for life.
After China and Hong Kong, the United States is the third-largest importer with some $12,000,000 in annual ejiao imports. This puts the aggressive roundups of federally-protected burros from public lands by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in an even more sinister light. Many are illegally funneled to kill pens, where they are at high risk of being purchased for their skins.
As awareness increases, US-based companies are beginning to remove products that contain ejiao from the market, but a federal law is needed to stop its sale and transportation in interstate and foreign commerce. H.R. 6021 has been re-introduced in the House by U.S. House Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) to do just that. When the European Union banned horse meat that is processed in Mexican slaughterhouses, the number of American horses being shipped across US borders for slaughter dropped from 150,000 to 20,000 a year. A US ban on ejiao imports could have a similar impact, saving the lives of countless beautiful souls.