Do Chinese Eat Donkey from Wal-Mart?

In the Wall Street Journal today, Laurie Burkitt and Shelly Banjo put together an interesting story about Wal-Mart operations in China.  http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304157204579473272856969150-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwNDExNDQyWj

I have written about this before in my first book.  China manipulates foreign businesses operating there, while not policing their own distribution channels.  In that case it was tainted pork, weighted with water, being sold by Wal-Mart in some of its stores.  The distributor eventually got the death penalty for that.  This is a little different.

They seem to have allowed one of their distributors to sell fox (the red furry thing that keeps low to the ground seeking the squirrels in my neighborhood) mislabeled as donkey.  This means, of course, that Chinese buyers thought they were getting donkey, when they were really getting fox.  We don't have a lot of that in the U.S. since Wal-Mart does not offer donkey anywhere I can think of.

While it is true that the Chinese are taking shots at big multinationals and won't clean up their own act, I couldn't get past the idea that donkey was a regular offering at Wal-Mart, no matter where it was.  Shame on them for substituting fox, which must have been really hard to come up with, since they are such small animals.  It would take 100 of them to make enough meat to equal one donkey.  But, donkey is not on very many menus anywhere I have ever been.

I did a little research and found that Muslims are allowed to eat wild donkeys, but not domesticated ones. [ http://islamqa.info/en/85534]  But, not very many people eat them, largely because the meat is tough.  Fox must be too.  There are not very many references to eating either one of them. Do the Chinese really need to eat donkey?    Amazon books: