A horse in danger runs. A donkey stands its ground. That is not temperament but a program written in a desert 4,000 kilometers away.
Screenshot: National Geographic Photo of the Day · Original page
Today's National Geographic photograph looks like an ordinary moment:
A man sits in a car and holds a carrot through the window. Several donkeys lean in to eat.
The caption identifies the man as Germán Flores and the donkey he is feeding as Pancho. The place is Burrolandia in Otumba, Mexico - literally, "Donkeyland." Flores co-founded the sanctuary in 2006 with one purpose: to preserve Mexico's donkeys.
A sanctuary for donkeys sounds like a kind and comforting story.
It is. But follow that carrot backward and it leads to facts much harder than comfort.
A Place with Only About a Hundred Donkeys
Burrolandia is in the municipality of Otumba in the State of Mexico, a ten-minute drive from the pyramids of Teotihuacan and about an hour from Mexico City. Its website lists 98 donkeys and hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day. Admission takes the form of a donation: 80 pesos for visitors under 18 and 100 pesos for adults. People with disabilities, children under three and sponsors enter free. There are also separate suggested donations for groups and schools, meaning the sanctuary is deliberately set up to welcome children together.
There were two founders: Germán Flores and his son Raúl Flores, both identified as co-founders. Guided visits, sponsorships, volunteer work and public donations keep the sanctuary operating. One English-language report says it needs about 1,000 visitors a month to break even.
The population changes continually: 93 donkeys in May 2024 and 98 by the end of 2025. Nine foals had been born there in 2026, with five more expected.
Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska wrote about Burrolandia in La Jornada, calling it Latin America's only donkey sanctuary.
The sanctuary's website contains a sentence that explains the whole place:
A place where donkeys no longer have to work or suffer abuse, where they receive food, veterinary care and, most importantly, a great deal of love for these forgotten little animals.
"Forgotten" is the important word.
Nobody Knows How Many Donkeys Mexico Has Left
There is no agreed count of Mexico's remaining donkeys. The disagreement between sources says more than any single number.
- Mexico's major newspaper El Universal says the country had 1.5 million donkeys in 1991; the last official census stopped at 585,000 in 2007.
- The figure most often cited for today, "about 300,000," is Germán Flores's own estimate, not a government count.
- The Food and Agriculture Organization supplies an entirely different scale. A 2021 report by the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Edinburgh uses FAO data to give 3.2 million donkeys in 2019.
1.5 million, 585,000, 300,000 and 3.2 million. Four figures for one animal in one country, with more than a tenfold gap between the smallest and largest.
The lasting point is not which number is correct, but this:
When nobody counts an animal anymore, it has already begun to disappear from view.
(An April 2026 preprint is titled "The Statistical Invisibility of Working Equids in Mexico." The source article could not access its text, but the title alone captures the problem.)
The reasons for the decline are consistent and unsurprising across sources: farm mechanization, motorcycles and pickup trucks replacing pack transport, and people leaving the countryside for cities. Flores says modernization and motorized farm machinery made the donkey's role obsolete.
It was not slaughtered out of existence. It was superseded. An animal that had lived beside humans for 7,000 years suddenly became useless within a few decades.
There Is a Reason Donkeys Seem Stubborn
Anyone who has handled a donkey, or even heard one described, knows the stereotype: donkeys are stubborn. Pull and they will not move. Push and they stand still.
Animal behavior offers a much more elegant explanation.
A 2026 University of Florida veterinary and extension publication, VM279, says:
Compared with horses, donkeys rely more on freeze-and-fight than flight. Fleeing danger often means leaving a precious resource such as water while causing further dehydration. A donkey's instinct when uncertain or threatened is therefore to stop.
Take the argument apart.
Where did horses come from? Grassy plains with abundant forage and water. The land can sustain large herds. When danger arrives, dozens of horses run together; more grass and water lie farther on, so the cost is low. A horse's first answer is flight.
Where did donkeys come from? Some of Africa's hottest, driest and least vegetated country. It cannot support a large herd. Surveys by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's specialist group find that wild asses usually form temporary groups of fewer than five. The only stable unit is a mother and her young; adult males are often solitary. Nearly all observed wild asses have remained within 30 kilometers of a known water source.
In that landscape, running only carries you farther from water and makes you thirstier.
The donkey's evolved answer is to stop, turn, face the danger and kick if necessary.
The Donkey Sanctuary in Britain gives a matching behavioral description. When startled, a donkey may move only a short distance, then turn and face whatever concerns it. Its flight mechanism is reduced, and it displays fewer visible signs of fear.
A donkey's "stubbornness" was never a matter of temperament. It is a survival program written by the desert and passed down for 7,000 years.
There is a pleasing coincidence in an old Chinese fable. Liu Zongyuan's "The Donkey of Guizhou" tells of a donkey brought to Guizhou. A tiger first fears it, then tests it until the donkey responds. The original needs only four Chinese characters: in anger, the donkey kicks.
Stand, turn, kick.
A Chinese fable written 1,200 years ago accidentally recorded every step of the program. Liu was not writing animal behavior, of course; it is simply an enjoyable coincidence. The ending is familiar: the tiger understands that the donkey has no further trick and kills it. The phrase "the Guizhou donkey has exhausted its tricks" became an insult the animal has carried for more than a millennium.
How Much Drought Can It Endure?
The same desert program is written into the donkey's body.
A Food and Agriculture Organization report on water needs among livestock in African pastoral systems gives several figures. Donkeys can tolerate 30 percent dehydration. A working donkey watered every other day loses 21 percent of its body water in two days, then replaces it rapidly and completely. Appetite does not begin to fall until dehydration exceeds 15 percent, or even 23 percent in Sinai donkeys.
The way it replaces the water is a detail made for children: it drinks 24 to 30 liters in two to five minutes and carries on.
Thirty liters is roughly one and a half large household water-cooler bottles, swallowed within five minutes.
(Another familiar claim is less secure: that a donkey's large ears dissipate heat. Researchers infer that they do, by analogy with African and Asian elephants, but no direct measurement of heat loss through donkey ears was found. The claim therefore remains an inference.)
Humans Domesticated Donkeys as the Sahara Dried
In 2022, an international team analyzed 238 donkey genomes for a paper in Science. Todd et al., DOI 10.1126/science.abo3503, concluded that domestic donkeys descend from a single domestication in East Africa more than 7,000 years ago, around 5000 BCE.
The French team involved in the study highlighted the meaning of that date in its release. Donkeys were domesticated as the Sahara was becoming the desert we know today.
Put the two together:
A donkey is not merely an animal that happens to live in a desert. The desert made the donkey, and as soon as it had done so, humans took hold of it.
The desert shaped an animal that could endure thirst, carry weight, move securely on stony slopes and refuse to bolt in danger. Humans then put it to work carrying loads for the next 7,000 years.
Fewer Than Two Hundred Wild Ancestors Remain
This is the heaviest fact in the story.
The domestic donkey's wild ancestor is the African wild ass, Equus africanus. The International Union for Conservation of Nature's 2015 Red List assessment classifies it as Critically Endangered, with a declining population.
Its estimated number of mature individuals is between 23 and 200.
About 112 live in Ethiopia's Danakil Desert. Eritrea's population was extrapolated at around 400, including immature animals. Somalia's last survey was in 1997; fewer than ten remained in the Nugaal Valley then, and there has been no further news. Within Ethiopia, the population fell by more than 95 percent over 35 years.
Put two numbers side by side:
The world has about 50 million domestic donkeys. Their wild ancestor has fewer than 200 mature animals left.
Humans turned one species into one of the planet's most common working animals while nearly erasing its original form.
(The assessment dates from 2015 and is already a decade old.)
China: From Nine Million to 1.2 Million
Now turn to China.
FAO data cited in a 2021 PLOS ONE study of the global donkey population show that China had 9.444 million donkeys in 1997 and 2.678 million in 2018, a fall of 71.6 percent in 21 years. The paper singled out China as having the world's largest absolute change during that period.
A newer domestic estimate is lower. At the tenth Donkey Industry Development Conference, organized by the China Animal Agriculture Association at the end of September 2025, former executive deputy secretary-general Wang Xiuyan said China's donkey inventory was plunging and expected to fall below 1.2 million in 2025, with fewer than 400,000 breeding females.
From about 11 million around 1990 to 1.2 million today: roughly 90 percent gone in three decades.
Half the explanation matches Mexico: mechanization. Tractors, three-wheelers and pickup trucks displaced donkeys from fields and roads. The other half is donkey hide.
The subject needs plain treatment. Donkey skin is used to make ejiao, a traditional gelatin product, and Chinese demand is large. Britain's Donkey Sanctuary estimates that at least 5.9 million donkeys are killed for their skins each year. Its 2019 report uses a different measure, estimating that ejiao production requires about 4.8 million skins annually. Both are advocacy-group estimates rather than official statistics, and one measures animals killed while the other measures demand for skins. They should not be conflated.
Donkeys grow and reproduce slowly. As demand rose, animals across Africa and Latin America were purchased and slaughtered in large numbers. The African Union responded in February 2024.
Almost every English- and Chinese-language report describes the AU summit as imposing a ban on the donkey-skin trade. The source article searched the formal decision of that Assembly of Heads of State and Government, Assembly/AU/Dec.866-902 (XXXVII), line by line and found no appearance of the word "donkey." The official action came instead from the Executive Council. Paragraph 33(viii) of EX.CL/Dec.1234(XLIV) "considered and adopted" an African Union Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources report titled Donkeys in Africa Now and in the Future. Its central recommendation was a 15-year moratorium on the commercial slaughter of donkeys for skins.
The precise account is therefore: this was a political commitment adopted at ministerial level, not a directly enforceable continent-wide law. Implementation still depends on national legislation. The distinction matters. A headline's "ban" and a document's "adoption of a report" are often not the same thing.
China Is Also Doing Something Else
Here there is an official primary text, and it is doing essentially the same work as Burrolandia.
The National Catalog of Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources Under Protection was issued as Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Announcement No. 940 on October 27, 2025. It contains 298 resources. Category nine reads:
9. Donkeys
Guanzhong donkey, Dezhou donkey, Guangling donkey, Biyang donkey, Xinjiang donkey, Qinghai donkey
Six local Chinese breeds are separately listed as genetic resources requiring national protection.
The list is backed by physical facilities. A publicly reproduced register from ministry Announcement No. 453 identifies a Guangling Donkey National Conservation Area in Guangling, Shanxi, as well as national conservation farms in Haixing, Hebei; Wudi and Dong'e, Shandong; Biyang, Henan; and elsewhere.
The ministry's policy explanation for the new catalog adds that China has more donkey breeds than any other country.
Germán Flores preserves donkeys in Mexico with a sanctuary. China preserves them with a catalog and conservation farms. The work is the same: once an animal has become entirely useless, find a way for it to continue existing.
Today Is Not a Donkey Holiday
For clarity, September 10, 2026 has no connection to a donkey observance.
World Donkey Day is May 8. Its founder placed it in the week after International Workers' Day because donkeys are among the world's most important laborers. Otumba's National Donkey Fair is real and has run since 1965; 2026 marked its 61st edition. But it takes place from late April through May 1 and was already over. World Farm Animals Day is October 2 and had not yet arrived.
(The festival deserves one aside because it is so inventive. The town center builds a donkey track called the Burrodromo. There is a donkey costume contest and a braying imitation contest, won by the person who sounds most like a donkey. There is donkey polo, played from donkey-back with a broom, and donkey races divided into "Formula One" and "Formula Two.")
Mexican Independence Day falls six days later, on September 16, but National Geographic gives no reason to connect the two, and neither will this article.
The photograph most likely appears today simply because it is new. It belongs to a 2026 project by animal-photography news agency We Animals titled More Than a Beast of Burden: Rethinking Donkeys in Mexico.
The photographer, Sara Escobar, is a Mexican documentary photographer and filmmaker born in 1984. A 2022 fellow of the VII Foundation, she has long photographed identity, social justice and resistance to violence in Mexico. She has received support from the National Geographic Society.
Image: National Geographic Photo of the Day, "Donkeyland" · Photograph: Sara Escobar · Original page
Sources
National Geographic Photo of the Day, September 10, 2026; Burrolandia; We Animals, More Than a Beast of Burden: Rethinking Donkeys in Mexico; VII Foundation photographer profile; El Universal; El Heraldo de Mexico; La Jornada Estado de Mexico; Mexico News Daily; University of Florida IFAS Extension publication VM279; The Donkey Sanctuary; IUCN Red List 2015 African wild ass assessment, via the Convention on Migratory Species; Moehlman et al. (2013), IUCN SSC Equid Specialist Group; Todd et al., Science 377 (2022), DOI 10.1126/science.abo3503; PLOS ONE (2021), DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0247830; 2021 report by Brooke and the University of Edinburgh Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies; FAO ILCA Research Report No. 7; African Union Executive Council decision EX.CL/Dec.1234(XLIV); China Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Announcement No. 940, via the Chinese government website; China Animal Agriculture Association Donkey Branch; and Liu Zongyuan, "The Donkey of Guizhou," from Three Admonitions.