Venue: Tampa

Date: 20 Nov 2024

Between 2014 and 2015, Pakistan exported nearly 200,000 donkey hides to China for traditional Chinese medicine. The fate of the donkey meat remained unclear, though reports in 2015 revealed haram donkey meat being sold as beef, leading to public outrage and ethnic tensions. Religious leaders reaffirmed donkey meat’s impermissibility. This talk examined the permissibility and prohibition of donkey consumption in Pakistan, arguing that such debates obscured the livelihoods of donkey keepers. Drawing on multispecies anthropology, it suggested that the core issue was not permissibility but why donkey meat became consumable at the first place.