Burro Week, observed each year in early May and centered on World Donkey Day on May 8, is a chance to pause and recognize an animal most people overlook.
During this week, advocates, sanctuaries, and communities celebrate burros’ long partnership with humans—from hauling ore and mail to quietly surviving on the margins of today’s fragmented rangelands.
The timing, set from May 5–12 this year, brackets World Donkey Day so there is space for field events, public education, and storytelling that highlight both domestic donkeys and their wild cousins on America’s deserts. In marking Burro Week, we are not just adding another date to the calendar, we are opening a window onto an animal whose toughness, intelligence, and gentle presence have shaped landscapes and livelihoods for centuries, yet whose future on our public lands remains anything but secure.
Let’s all work together this week to highlight burros and take action on their behalf.
The Ejiao threat
Donkeys worldwide are being slaughtered for the ejiao trade, where skins are boiled down into a gelatin used in some traditional products. That global trade has devastated donkey populations in many countries and has raised alarm among advocates working to protect both domestic donkeys and America’s wild burros. The global trade in ejiao is widely recognized by veterinary and public health experts as a significant risk factor for zoonotic disease.
The Ejiao Act matters. This legislation would ban the import, export, sale, and transport of ejiao and donkey skins in the United States, helping ensure that this country does not contribute to the cruel international donkey-skin market.
In the current Congress, Representative Don Beyer has introduced the Ejiao Act of 2025 as H.R. 5544, a bill that would prohibit the transportation, sale, and purchase of donkeys or donkey hides for ejiao production, and ban the transport, sale, and purchase of products containing ejiao.
As of May 5, 2026, H.R. 5544 had 14 cosponsors, and it needs many more to gain traction. This bill has simply sat unmoving since September 2025. This bill is NOT being actively fought against… it simply has no attention and is not seen as important.
Above: Spring Mountain jacks at Palomino Valley from ongoing bait trap operation
America’s Wild Burros
Early pioneers in advocacy made a deliberate choice to remove wild horses from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) movement for two reasons: 1) Wild Horses were disappearing from the American West too rapidly and the ESA was taking too long to pass through Congress. 2) Burros would be left entirely with no protections as they were being systematically shot and eradicated from the landscape.
The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed through Congress two years before the ESA was ratified. Part species protection, part historic preservation, the 1971 law set wild horses AND burros into the distinct public lands law category we have today. Without that law we would have no burros left at all.
Wild burros are not “throwaway” animals or relics to be erased from the landscape. They are part of the living story of the American West, and today they need the public to stand up for them as federal policies, shrinking habitat allocations, and removal plans continue to push many burro herds toward the edge of disappearing forever.
The numbers
BLM’s March 1, 2026 population report shows there are only 26 HMAs with burros present in the United States with a non-zero burro AML. Together, those HMAs carry a national burro AML range of 1,571 at the low end (which is the target goal).
Those 26 HMAs are spread across only five states: Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah.
When the total acreage of those burro HMAs is added together, wild burros are managed on only a little over 10 million acres of HMA land nationwide. That means BLM’s own framework sets a target low AML of just 1,571 wild burros on roughly 10 million acres of land where burros are allowed at all. For perspective, BLM manages 245 million acres of surface lands and the acreage burros occupy is about 4%.
Even within that limited footprint, only 9 burro HMAs have a burro AML high end over 100 animals. Those are Alamo, Big Sandy, Black Mountain, Cibola–Trigo, Havasu, Lake Pleasant, Chocolate–Mule Mountains, Twin Peaks, and Marietta Wild Burro Range. In other words, only a small handful of burro herds in the entire country are even allowed to exist at levels above 100 animals on paper. On most of these ranges human encroachment in the form of urban expansion and recreation is creating a crisis between humans and burros.
Tourists feeding burros on the road and in towns creates an issue that is not going away anytime soon
Agencies that still do not understand burros are not horses (or cows)
A severe knowledge gap runs straight through Appropriate Management Levels (AML). AMLs are still modeled as if a burro were simply half a cow or a small horse on paper, ignoring their different forage use, water efficiency, and social behavior on the range. On example is Lake Pleasant where what a burro actually eats is entirely ignored in any management option or setting of AML.
Helicopter drive trapping is especially dangerous for wild burros and should be prohibited on welfare grounds. Unlike cattle or horses, burros’ instinct under extreme pursuit is often to stiffen and push through exhaustion, not to show obvious distress, are not built for prolonged flight, which makes them highly susceptible to capture myopathy—fatal muscle and organ damage caused by intense exertion, heat, and stress. The long, high‑speed chases, close helicopter pressure, and chaotic crowding at trap sites can push burros past their physiological limits long before anyone sees “classic” signs of crisis. For an animal evolved to conserve energy, water, and movement on harsh desert ranges, this kind of pursuit is fundamentally incompatible with humane handling.
Helicopter roundups are only the first hit burros take from a system that doesn’t actually understand them. In holding, federal agencies routinely manage, feed, and treat burros as if they were small horses or generic livestock, despite clear evidence that their nutritional, metabolic, and stress responses are different. BLM even fails to recognize how critical shelter is for burros who do not have a water resistant coat. Over and over high numbers of deaths where improper feed and medical care are uncovered in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) work.
Once burros are removed, agencies provide adopters with generic “wild horse and burro” care sheets that gloss over critical differences in diet, handling, and medical risk, even though capture‑related stress and mismanagement can lead to hyperlipidemia, capture myopathy, colic, and sudden, unexplained deaths after placement. When the managers themselves are feeding and treating burros incorrectly, it is no surprise that they fail to pass on accurate information—leaving adopters to learn by trial and error, and burros to pay the price.
Burros matter
Wild burros are uniquely adapted to harsh desert country, with long ears that help regulate heat, strong hooves for rocky ground, and the endurance to travel difficult terrain where few other animals can thrive. They form strong family bonds and maintain recognizable social relationships, making them far more complex and sensitive than the stereotypes often used to dismiss them.
Burros as well‑diggers and desert allies
When surface water disappears, wild burros paw and dig into dry washes and sandy streambeds until they expose shallow groundwater, sometimes more than six feet down. These hoof‑dug wells can dramatically increase the number of places where surface water is available on an arid landscape, turning bare stretches of desert into strings of temporary oases.
Camera traps and field studies have documented badgers, deer, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, black bears, birds, and even young trees using or sprouting around these wells, which makes burros true “ecosystem engineers” alongside animals like beavers. In some sites, abandoned burro wells have been shown to act as nurseries where significantly more cottonwood and willow seedlings germinate than in adjacent riverbanks, literally rooting new life in places that would otherwise stay dry. None of this is being considered in management planning today as the West faces periods of extended drought.
Burros also carry the history of the West in every hoofbeat. Their ancestors helped build mining camps, transport supplies, and connect remote communities, and today their descendants still move through canyons, washes, and mountain passes that have shaped the cultural and ecological history of public lands.
Legal work
All of this makes current burro appeals and federal litigation even more urgent. Wild Horse Education is actively engaged in appeals and litigation involving burro country. One active appeal involves Tassi-Gold where the extreme measure of completely zeroing out 1,400 burros based on old data, not including new information that paints burros in a beneficial light, has been approved. There are so few burro HMAs and our burros deserve more consideration.
From addressing how (and how many) burros are managed in the range to how burros are mistreated during and after capture our team is engaged.
One thing you can do today is to push your lawmakers to include the formalization of welfare standards into the spending bill. BLM is halfway through the process and simply stopped short of the last steps to create the first enforceable welfare standards since the 1971 Act passed 55 years ago. Burro specific standards are desperately needed.
Learn more here and take action.
Thank you for celebrating national burro week with us.
May we join together and give our wild burros a voice that cannot be ignored.
We need your support to keep our teams engaging lawmakers, our team fighting in the court, our team ready to run the roundup schedule. Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support
Categories: Wild Horse Education
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