I found this interesting and had no clue that donkeys were a staple in China. Kind of freaky for westerners with many PETA believers, but people in the world eat a variety of meat we would not even think of. Dogs are a common choice as well, but this is a cultural thing. Sad to Americans and probably Europeans, but some nations have no other choice, and some are following cultural customs. This is a factoid for you. All IMO.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/27/china-donkey-meat-brazil-food-markets-trade/
“In the mid-1990s, China was a donkey superpower. It had nearly 10 million, around a quarter of the global population and far more than any other country. But the size of China’s donkey herd has crashed by 85 percent since then. The main driver of this decline has been the mechanization of farms—donkeys were kept as a working animal, with the meat as a byproduct. By 2024, China’s mechanization rate for crop planting and harvesting was 74 percent—up from just 32 percent in 2000.
Even though China’s meat market has grown tremendously over the same period, with consumption roughly doubling, few farmers have chosen to raise donkeys specifically for meat. The biggest reasons for this are biological. Donkeys take longer to reach sexual maturity and are slower breeders compared to other livestock—a fact often jokingly attributed to their stubborn nature.
In modern agriculture, however, biology is also a function of investment. Ian Lahiffe, a Beijing-based agricultural technology consultant, explains that genetics companies have shown little interest in improving the “efficiency” of donkeys, which are viewed as too niche compared to cattle or pigs. This creates a feedback loop as popular livestock become ever more productive—according to U.N. statistics, China’s meat yield per cow has growth by some 50 percent since the 1980s, while donkeys have stagnated.”