How Moyale stubbed cruel habit of feeding donkeys bhang
By Jacob Walter, August 15, 2025In Moyale, a dusty frontier town straddling the Kenya–Ethiopia border, donkeys are more than beasts of burden; they are lifelines.
They haul water across arid plains, carry firewood to homes, and ferry goods to bustling market stalls. In a land where survival often depends on endurance, these animals are the silent engines of daily life.
For years, many of Moyale’s donkeys endured a cruel and dangerous ritual. Before long, gruelling treks, owners would feed them bhang(cannabis)to push them to work harder, faster, and longer.
The practice, imported from neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia, was so normalised that visiting outsiders often left in shock.
Today, that grim chapter has closed. Moyale’s donkeys now graze freely, their drug-fuelled days replaced by quieter lives of honest labour.
This transformation did not happen overnight. It took months of carefully crafted community engagement led by the African Network for Animal Welfare (ANAW), in partnership with Marsabit County officials and a network of local animal welfare mobilisers.
“We can confirm this practice no longer happens in Moyale,” says Dr Dennis Bahati, an ANAW animal welfare expert. “The community has understood the cruelty involved and embraced better ways of caring for their animals.”
The campaign didn’t just appeal to compassion, it hit home with practical arguments. Donkey owners learned that cannabis caused dehydration, strain, and premature aging in animals, reducing productivity over time. For families whose livelihoods depended on their donkeys, this was a persuasive case.
Bahati spoke during a recent three-day anti-rabies vaccination drive across Moyale’s sub-counties. The exercise vaccinated 1,500 donkeys and doubled as a platform to raise awareness about a worrying trend: a surge in donkey thefts.
Raising awareness
Stolen donkeys often vanish into a shadowy trade network, smuggled hundreds of kilometres to towns such as Nakuru, where they are slaughtered for meat and hide.
Donkey hide is in high demand in parts of Asia, where they are boiled to make ejiao, a gelatin believed to have medicinal and cosmetic properties.
“Reports indicate that around 4.8 million donkeys are slaughtered annually for their skins to meet this demand,” Bahati warns, pointing out that the extractive, unregulated trade poses huge risks to animal welfare, public health and the environment.
His concern is backed by recent arrests, such as the two people caught in Limuru town secretly slaughtering donkeys. Such acts not only decimate donkey populations but also risk contaminating the beef supply chain with unregulated meat.
Kenya banned donkey slaughter in 2020, closing four licenced abattoirs. But the ban was overturned in 2021 after a court challenge from business owners. Since then, donkey populations have plummeted—dropping by nearly a million between 2019 and 2020 alone. Today, only 1.1 million donkeys remain in the country.
Part of Moyale’s success is credited to community mobilisers like Abdikadir Galgallo, who spent months meeting owners at markets, watering points, and villages.
“The people have stopped this act. It was a bad habit we picked from across the border, and now our donkeys are treated with respect,” Galgallo says.
The campaign tapped into a sense of local pride. Instead of framing the change as an outside imposition, it celebrated it as a homegrown commitment to dignity and humane treatment.
In Marsabit, donkeys are integral not just to transport but to resilience in the face of drought, floods, and even ethnic conflicts.
“There are over 100,000 donkeys in Marsabit,” says Salad Halakhe, chairperson of the Moyale Donkey Owners Network.
Yet the threats remain. In Moyale’s neighbourhoods—Biashara Street, Butiye, Golbo, Gurumesa, Heilu, and beyond, donkey theft is still a real fear.
With over 15 trailers ferrying donkeys weekly during peak trade, tracking and regulating the shipments is nearly impossible. That means infected hides can circulate unchecked, spreading diseases such as anthrax, MRSA, and other zoonotic illnesses.
A study by The Donkey Sanctuary found that out of 108 donkey skin samples tested in Kenya between 2019 and 2020, 88 were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, and some carried the flesh-eating toxin Panton-Valentine leucocidin.
The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) has labelled the global donkey skin trade a breach of animal welfare laws, citing violations such as prolonged transport without water, failure to provide veterinary care, and chronic stress that weakens immunity.
Affordable technology
For Dr Josiah Ojwang, ANAW’s CEO, the lesson is clear: donkey welfare must be embedded into national policy and development strategies. “We must recognise donkey use and management as an appropriate and affordable technology for people with minimal resources,” he says, adding that donkey welfare is not a luxury but a necessity for human survival.
Ojwang calls for wider awareness of the Five Freedoms of animal welfare; freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury or disease, fear and distress, and freedom to express normal behaviour, extending them to working donkeys.
In Moyale, as the vaccination teams pack up and the market day dust settles, the sight of donkeys grazing quietly in open fields tells a different story than it did just a few years ago.
They are no longer pushed beyond their limits with drugs. They are working partners, valued not just for their strength, but for their role in keeping life moving in a harsh but resilient land.