Thursday, February 18, 2010

to all those animal welfare activists


Decided to write this piece after a discussion with a colleague over lunch. My colleague is a vegan & cannot stand the thought of a non-vegetarian dish. Today, he was giving me the reasoning behind his decision to not consume meat. According to him ( & many others, I am sure) it is not "right" to kill an animal & consume its flesh. Just because they cannot respond back, doesn't mean we have right to kill & eat them. Well, he was almost echoing the thoughts of the animal right activists who are presently protesting against killing of animals for consumption. Earlier these protests were mainly for cruelty towards animals & their killing for recreation/product manufacture. But as per the newspaper, new rounds of protests are against consumption as well.

Surprisingly most of these protests are against the killing of cows. There has been no mention about killing of chicken, duck, pig or even fishing. Evidently our nation's dear animal activists do not care about the pigs, goats & chicken, though they are being butchered & consumed in much larger numbers. In spite of cows being butchered in very less numbers for food in the country, focus is primarily on them. Makes me think, is there a hidden religious agenda behind this "animal welfare". I always knew that people are distinguished always on basis of their religion, caste, creed color. But did they start a caste system in animals as well? Interesting.

And an even interesting was an article which I read in the newspaper yesterday morning. I had to do some googling to get a web article of the same. I wanted to get the attention of our dear animal welfare activists on this particular piece of news. It seems thousands of rams & bulls were sacrificed in a temple in Kushtagi, a village 6hours away from Bangalore - the silicon valley of India. Villagers say that children were made to stay indoors, so that they dont see the gory scene as rivers of blood flowed through the temple grounds. While I read through the article, I wonder "where were the animal activists doing on that Sunday morning?". This was not a surprise party which the villagers decided to throw, but a practice which have been followed for years. But then, like I mentioned before, our activists are only worried about the cows & not surprisingly no cow was harmed in the sacrifice !

It doesn't require a lot of intellect to understand the "animal welfare" in the country is driven more by religious sentiments rather than actual love for the animal. Killing for the sake of consumption/nutrition is being banned while the law looks the other way when mass sacrifices are being made. With the large number of activists fueled by religious sentiments to their godly animals, the future of tasty food looks bleak for the minority non-vegetarians. For the time being I will have to survive on chicken in a land where, Lion is not the King, the Cow is !