Donkeys and Me: Researcher and lecturer, Dr David Obiero

What led you into work in veterinary medicine in the first place? 

There’s one thing that impacted me very much when I was younger. The KSPCA (Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals) once visited my village. I saw this very big truck and they were coming to rescue a kitten beside the road that had broken its leg. I thought, “So there are people who do this, who actually look into the issues of animals beyond the commercial aspects.” 

That image of someone fuelling a vehicle and travelling all the way from I don’t know where, just to rescue a kitten because someone called them, it planted a seed of the importance of looking at things from the animal’s point of view. 

The science came in later, because now we know that there are a lot of links between the animal’s wellbeing, its capacity to fend off diseases, and human health itself. But that was the first time I started identifying my direction. 

How did you end up in this role? 

I did my student internship at KSPCA where they had a donkey project, which was funded by The Donkey Sanctuary. That was my first contact with animals that are on the periphery of being companion animals and livestock.

I got involved in practical work and had the privilege of accompanying the field vets. We realised in the field that the advisory materials were referring to horses, not donkeys. A mentor told us that “donkeys are not small horses”. It made me curious, how do we get to know more about this species?  

I graduated from my undergraduate degree in 2007. After that I started working in programmes at the KSPCA. I got interested in non-commercial veterinary work looking at the benefits for animals and the community.

In 2011, I decided to study for my Masters. I looked at the occurrence of a tick borne parasite in a very dry part of Kenya. I focused on donkeys because we were coming across cases that we did not have the solutions for.  

I continued, after that, to do programme work with donkey welfare organisations until 2018, when I decided to mentor young minds at the university. This was important to me because, across the country, the number of vets that could confidently handle donkey cases were only a handful. 

I felt it would be useful - to local communities and as a service to my profession - to mentor from experience, not just the literature. I take a lot of joy in mentoring. And I feel very privileged that I get to research gaps that I’ve actually experienced in the field too.  

What does your day-to-day work look like?  

At the university, we have three pillars that guide our work - teaching, research and community engagement. A lot of time is spent lecturing animal health students. In Kenya, we call them para veterinarians, the equivalent of veterinary nurses in Europe. 

There is also practical teaching and one-to-one mentorship with final year students working on their projects. We have a three to four month break after finishing the semester in April where we get time to do our research. 

You are the lead researcher on the latest Donkeys in Global Trade report. When did you first hear about the donkey skin trade? 

I remember very vividly. In 2016, I was working for a donkey project and my workstation was not far from the first donkey slaughterhouse in Kenya. Before then, my mentorship was around the best veterinary practice for donkey welfare. Now to hear about a donkey slaughterhouse, it was so different.

When we visited for the first time, it was so strange seeing a donkey being pushed down the line into the stunning box. Now that I’m older, I realise that it was trauma for me. During training at university, we visited cattle slaughterhouses, but seeing donkeys… it was very traumatic.  

We know from basic livestock production that you do not slaughter the parent stock, but we could see that there were many jennies being slaughtered and a good number of them were pregnant. This is an animal that takes around 13 months to foal, so we knew the impact on donkey numbers was going to be serious.  

Around that time is when we started hearing about the transport of skins to China. You could see in the slaughterhouse that the priority was the skin. They had a very huge dump site for the bones and most of the meat. That was my first contact with the skin trade.  

You researched the impact on communities of donkeys being stolen for their skins. What did that look like? 

I heard about people conducting research into the impact of stolen donkeys on communities. I was very interested. It would be a good opportunity for people to share their stories and I knew which communities to approach from my previous work.  

The research was designed to focus on women specifically. We looked at both the rural and peri-urban communities. In the rural community, the water infrastructure is not so good, the distances are longer to travel, even the road is not good. But on the flip side, because they have lots of land, they have space for owning more animals. 

The peri-urban donkey owners are very near town. They have restricted space for animals, so you find that they own one or two. We hypothesised that the impacts and coping mechanisms will be different. 

We did two layers of gathering information. First, there was a questionnaire. We planned to reach 150 women over five regions of Kenya, but in some areas, we got more participants because people really felt that their stories needed to be told. 

Secondly, we conducted interviews with 17 of those who filled in the questionnaire and selected three for an in-depth video interview. 

Was there anything in the research that surprised you?  

The beauty about research is that it’s always like going to school and learning from the participants.

I learned that when a donkey is stolen, in a rural community they could easily go to their neighbour and borrow a donkey. On average people have three or four donkeys and they are very close to each other.

In Kenya, we have ‘chamas’ where women in rural communities come together in a cooperative because they are raising kids and want to save. They put a little bit of money aside as a group and they can loan from that pool of money to the community. These groups are normally very strong, and if I lose my donkey I can borrow one. 

They also help with things like shared childcare. There is a price for borrowing the donkey of course. When I go to the river, I might have to also collect water for my neighbour which is extra labour for me and I cannot overload or mistreat the donkey, so I might have to do more trips. But I have a donkey I can use until I can replace my own, so I will not suffer too much. 

However, the women who own donkeys in peri-urban communities, once their donkey is lost it is much more impactful. Their neighbours only have one donkey themselves, so there is no donkey to borrow. They slide down a tier in their poverty levels. 

This was so extreme that interviewing people was difficult because they disappeared. They were no longer donkey owners, their capacity to earn reduced and they had to move back to rural areas. What was even sadder was that they also could not participate in women’s groups, because there is a requirement to contribute money every month. They had lost their social capital.  

It was very humbling to find that one lady washed clothes and cleaned houses for 13 months to save for another donkey. Prices had shot up. She’s now very anxious. What if she replaces her donkey and it gets stolen again? Getting a place around town to secure a donkey is not easy. Things like that were very unique learnings that don’t necessarily make it into the paper, but they remain with you. 

In your research, it seemed that there were emotional impacts on the women too. 

Yes, it was so evident. In my programme work before the skin trade, everybody knew that if it was an area where women are predominantly the owners of the donkey, then delivering behaviour change was much easier.

Donkeys are powerful animals, but women handled them without canes, using just verbal communication. They develop a way of working with donkeys without having to use any force. That process makes them very close to the animals. Most of the women actually name their donkeys. It becomes a hybrid of a companion animal and an animal that helps you day to day to get things done.

We also came across a demographic of single mothers or widows. One woman was very emotional about losing her donkey, because she told us that the donkey was actually like her husband, “helping me bring money like my husband used to.” 

What do you hope will come out of the publication of this research?  

I hope that it significantly contributes to convincing policymakers of the value of donkeys. They are lawyers or business people. The language that they understand is evidence. 

For us working in donkey welfare, we need to be tactful and strategic. With the moratorium, we need to generate a lot of evidence so that it stays or we get a complete ban. 

There are a lot of opportunities to include donkeys in the language of policymakers as production animals. Donkeys have roles across agriculture and livestock production systems that are not recognised. 

The value we have in Kenya for the contribution of livestock to the gross domestic product must be severely underestimated, because donkeys are not part of the conversation. Policymakers need to understand that they are more useful alive than as products from their different parts.