No Love and Neigh in Slaughterhouses – Donkey's Rock and Roll Threatened

 

It was not without love and neighing that Northeastern music artists sang about the different ways of life of animals in Brazil. While Luiz Gonzaga sang that the donkey is our brother, Genival Lacerda, in his Donkey’s Rock and Roll (Rock do Jegue), sang and interpreted that animals have the right to love, doing this in a neighing duet, according to these two videos.

Unfortunately, what you see today are the donkeys on the road towards the slaughterhouses, in the greatest brutality and cruelty of man, which are not only against their fellow men but against donkeys throughout the Northeast region. This is the negation of what our artists said when they interpreted and told the lives of these animals, which should be seen as sacred, just like the cows in India.

Today, deceased, our artists must stir in their graves because of the criminal slaughter our donkeys are being subjected to and the avarice of Chinese businessmen and their pornographic profits, on top of our long-suffering brother – donkey, as Luiz Gonzaga said. The extermination of donkeys is the extermination of a culture and the Northeast without the donkey is not the Northeast.

For the coordinator of the Donkey Defense Front, Gislane Brandão, the donkey is an endangered species due to the slaughter of more than 70,000 of them per year. It is estimated that more than 600,000 donkeys have been slaughtered since 2016, with only 300,000 of them remaining in the Northeast region. For the specialists, there must be a ban on slaughtering urgently.

“We are raising a wake-up call because this is the final opportunity to save our last donkeys. There is no more time, we have to stop the slaughter”, said Brandão. In turn, according to an estimate by the English institution called Donkey Sanctuary, “20% of the animals die before they even reach the slaughterhouses due to the suffering imposed”.

The donkey is, above all, a resistant animal, a survivor of the northeastern caatinga, whose death depends on very exaggerated suffering, including hunger. How they are going to be killed, it does not matter if they are going to starve. As the coordinator said, “the donkeys are piled into trucks, deposited on farms without food and water, which causes enormous suffering and death”.

The animals are captured and purchased by all states in the Northeast and transported clandestinely and irregularly to three slaughterhouses in Bahia. From what has been said, there are already lawsuits and discussions in the Chamber of Deputies, belatedly asking for a ban on slaughter. It is hoped that this violence will be stopped as soon as possible.

It is regrettable that the animal that served as transportation for Jesus Christ, more than two thousand years ago, is treated with violence like that of Christ's executioners, even if it is an animal. We know that one of the characteristics of the donkey is the calm and patience that, as we are seeing, is given even at the moment of death.

When the football player, Kay Havertz, from Chelsea in England, was asked by the press why his colleagues called him a donkey, he replied: “It’s not because of my football”. “It's something deeper”. From the beginning “I felt a special relationship with the donkeys. It's a very calm animal: maybe I personalised myself in them because I'm calm too.

For Havertz, they relax all day. They “don't do much and just want to live their life. I love them”. And when I lost, I wish I was close to them. I look at animals and I “see something human in them” that brings me healing and peace.

Among us, unfortunately, not even the cross that the donkey has drawn on its back has freed it, as the artist said, from so much suffering and now from such a cruel death. While Sanctuary of Donkeys is raising donations to improve the lives of five million donkeys in the world, we are exterminating what we have left.

For this organization, without an improvement in the living conditions of animals, there is no quality of human life. We lack environmental justice and environmental education, which prevents us from contemplating and relating in harmony with nature. It is worth remembering that we will not live without nature's resources. Preserving them is the least we should do.

A society that disrespects and does not protect its fellows and animals, acting in environmental destruction, is far from the reach of human dignity and well perfected in brutality and violence. Finally, the artist asked - whose donkey is this? Ask our authorities and Chinese misers.