The WACPAW/EonA team are again in Bolga for a four day assessment and inspection of Animal Cruelty and pet (dog) meat consumption. The team started its inspections at Awinpala’s donkey slaughter slab. Awinpala is a known donkey butcher within his community. He mostly slaughters between 15 to 24 donkeys per week or sometimes more depending on the demand. He buys the donkeys from Burkina Faso where they are in abundance.
Mode of transport: The donkeys walk 14hrs from the point of sale in Burkina Faso to the slaughter slab in northern Ghana without food or water. Some of them get so exhausted that they have to be killed on the way.
Slaughter process: Those billed for slaughter are brought calmly to the slab and stunned with a small hammer to make render the donkey unconscious prior cutting the throat. We observed that the stunning was effective on the younger donkeys but the older ones had to be hit more than three times before they fell down which was very disturbing. The knives used for the bleeding were also very small and blunt and we had to intervene by asking them to use a cutlass instead to stop the agonizing pain the donkeys were going through.
General observation: The donkeys were very weak due to excessive hunger and thirst and the slaughter process was very cruel.
Recommendations:
We recommended that he gets a bigger hammer or a captive bolt stunner for effective stunning and also longer and very sharp knives for effective bleeding. We also encouraged them to at least feed,water and allow them to rest a bit before slaughtering them. They were very open to our ideas and suggestions and assured us of making improvements before our next visit.
It was a very difficult spectacle and we couldn’t stay long to see more of the agonizing deaths of the very gentle and docile donkeys being hammered to death. EonA and WACPAW are going to try to organize bringing captive bolt pistols and knife sharpeners. We expect them to set up water and feeding troughs. We will return later this year and not give up.
