Animal rights: the Hindu way, the Abrahamic way
But only India is targeted by agenda-driven PETA busybodies
An edited version of this essay was published on Nov 24 by PGurus at https://www.pgurus.com/animal-rights-violations-everywhere-but-only-india-is-targeted-by-peta-busybodies/
Here is an extract. Please go to the above link for the full essay.
Today, I watched with some surprise two rhesus monkeys (a mother and child, probably) amble casually along the sunshade of my neighbor’s house as I was walking in my yard. One fine day in July, at the height of the Wuhanvirus lockdown, I had seen a full-grown peacock perched on the same neighbor’s terrace.
When I was a kid, we used to live close to the vast palace grounds, and then we used to have monkeys come swinging regularly along the treetops, and they would raid our house. We wanted to discourage them, and once we set out a coconut shell with some rice with fish curry hidden underneath, knowing that monkeys avoid anything non-vegetarian.
Sure enough, a monkey grabbed the rice, but when it smelled the fish on his fingers, he was aghast, and started trying to get it off. He started rubbing his paw on the ground, and on cement in his panic, and he did it so hard that his skin was rubbed raw and started to bleed. We were left shaken, thinking about how cruel and inhumane we had been to that poor animal.
And then there was the poor pregnant elephant in May which had had her jaw blown off by a cracker hidden inside a pineapple; without going on a rampage in rage, she had gone quietly to the river where she tried to ease her pain by immersing her jaw in the water; and she starved to death with her foetus. There was an outpouring of sympathy from ordinary people; of course, as is usual, the culprits got away.
I was thinking of all this when faux animal-rights supporters of Peta, as well as the usual suspects, started talking about how Diwali crackers were such an annoyance to their dogs.
I wouldn’t know: I haven’t had a dog since childhood when Dog Dooley walked out on us (I have to tell you that story one day: it was embarassing that a dog, a dog, abandoned us). Maybe they’re right, and dogs are very affected by crackers. I had a friend in Bangalore who had a dog and also suffered from migraines, and she said they both had a hard time with fireworks.
Anyway, quite obviously, Indians are not perfect stewards of animals. If the large and growing human population encroaches on what should rightly be preserved as the territory of wild animals, and at least half our population consumes meat and fish, and we have the largest number of cattle in the world, as we are heavy consumers of dairy and leather, we couldn’t possibly be perfect.
But we are far better in terms of animal husbandry than other countries are. There are many gaushalas, though not to make a difference to stray animals. There are people trying to prevent illegal cow-smuggling and slaughter, although these still happen.
There are the Bishnois, who have been willing to sacrifice their own lives rather than see an animal suffer. And Hindus in general have scriptural prescriptions to be lacto-vegetarian, though many otherwise devout Hindus may not follow them.
If plant-based meat/fish/milk take off then we’ll all cause less animal suffering.
Yet Hindus in particular are targeted by do-gooding busybodies such as Peta.
These alleged animal lovers are very quiet when millions of animals are regularly butchered on, say, Eid, or Thanksgiving. It is pure hypocrisy, but they know that Hindus can be shamed into all sorts of things: for instance, the prevailing conventional wisdom is drumming into the heads of all Indians that Diwali must be banned, regardless of the actual facts in air pollution.
This much we have known for a long time. What is current is a gruesome situation that unfolded itself in Denmark in the last week or so. It startled me. Most of us have a positive impression of Scandinavians (all those blue eyed blondes, I suppose, not to mention the welfare states, and maybe all that talk of the stoic Lutherans of Lake Wobegon, where the “women are all strong, the men are good-looking and the children are above-average”.
The reality is, alas, far more morbid and gruesome, as it usually is. (WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGES).
The Danish government decided to slaughter (news reports used the rather antiseptic euphemism “cull”) 17 million minks, that is, its entire population of these small animals that are bred for their fur. The reason was that a mutant variant of the Wuhanvirus was discovered in some small number of them.
What followed was a true tragedy. Minks, small creatures roughly like otters, have been preyed upon for their fur: they have been farmed to be slaughtered so that women (in particular) can wear coats made of the sleek, smooth coats of the animal. This, when faux fur made of fiber looks just as good.
To give credit where it is due, Peta-type agitations have made natural fur a bit of a no-no in certain circles: there were dramatic protests where people made the fur useless by dumping red paint on it, if I remember right. So maybe it will become less fashionable over time, but still there’s a lot of farmed minks around (thankfully, they are not trapped in the wild in excrutiating fashion so much any more).
Not surprisingly (remember the tiger trade) the biggest number of farmed minks are in China (about 20 million), but Denmark has 17 million.
… end of extract