Frankly, I’m not buying this story…it has “hoax” written all over it.
In the first place, do you realize how little meat there is on a fox? Picture a scrawny dog-maybe 20 lb. max.
It would not be worth the effort.
Donnkey and horse taste like a sweeter and very lean grass fed beef. Fox is gamey, sort of how lamb is mild and mutton is stronger tasting, or venison is stronger tasting than beef - typically the meat from carnivores is going to be gamey tasting.
What they were doing was taking and layering the fox meat from foxes grown for fur with cheap fat to make it look like stripey well marbled lamb or donkey meat. It appeared that the way to actually tell the difference visibly was that the fox fake meat was stripes of either meat or fat, sort of like bacon while real donkey had little veins of fat in the meat as well as the big stripes of fat. Let me hit google for pictures.
This is the good meat, see the veining and stripes of fat?
Here is the buzzfeed article with an excellent explanation and great illustrations.
I would have no problem eating fox as long as I knew it was fox, but if I am buying donkey or lamb, that is what I want to be eating.
All the storied we’ve heard in the last few years about adulterated products from China (poison milk, dog food, toothpaste, … ) sound eerily similar to American stories from about a century ago, of “The Jungle” type. China’s just following in our footsteps, about a hundred years behind.
So we should be expecting them to be declaring war on The Spanish Empire at some point, after a Chinese ship mysteriously explodes in Havana’s harbour?