This site built and maintained by: Greanville Associates Rev. 3.26.03 Copyright ANIMAL PEOPLE, INC. 1992--2003

ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS CLICK HERE Most Recent Issues The Eberle Mess Search this Site! Important Materials Cool Links Watchdog Report Subscribe Online (safe) Spanish Edition French Edition Editorial Sampler AP articles Sampler AP Masthead The LEWYT Awards EMAIL US

MAY 2004

CHENNAI, VISAKHAPATNAM The Madras High Court on April 2, 2004 ruled that cattle donated to Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples in Tamil Nadu state may not be sold or auctioned for any reason.

The cattle must instead be sent to gaushalas or pinjarapoles managed by authorized nonprofit animal welfare societies, which must be inspected not less often than every 60 days to ensure that the animals are properly cared for.

"But the temple authorities do not have any funds to maintain these cattle," Buddhiraju continued. "The previous executive officer used to auction the cattle. That has been stopped. But we can't stop this custom. Thousands of animals are offered, and how can we accommodate such large number?"

Elaborated Compassion Unlimited Plus Action vice president Suparna Baksi Ganguly, helping the Visakha SPCA to amplify awareness of the case, "The villagers can't support the bull calves, so they donate them to the temples instead of selling them directly to butchers. Donating bull calves to a temple is a euphemism for sending them to slaughter."

The donations take the place of a tithe, and temple staff, as agents of religion, are commonly perceived as exempt from the strictures placed on secular people.

Buddhiraju summoned Nath, who arrived on April 4.

"There were 70 bull calves," Nath found, "from just days old to four months old, tied to the trees by devotees as offerings to the Lord on the occasion of an April 1 festival, who were without any food or water. When we stopped them from auctioning the calves to the butchers," who had gathered for the sale, "the temple authorities decided to let them loose," to run and fall down the 1,000 steps leading up to the temple.

Lame bullocks are not exempt from slaughter. Upon suffering the inevitable injuries on the steps, the bull calves could be claimed by the waiting butchers.

In the next 24 hours the Visakha SPCA seized more than 300 unweaned calves, among 400 cattle altogether, and struggled to find the means to look after them.

"A person has come forward to give transportation [to the Visakha SPCA shelter] free," Nath e-mailed to supporters. "There is not a single gaushala in Andhra Pradesh sincerely working to save bull calves from slaughter. All want only females. It is very sad. I cannot say no to accepting them, which would mean we are not protecting them and would encourage the butchers. How do I feed them? They are not adoptable. We are in a fix. We are busy tending to the most dehydrated and injured calves. How many will survive, I do not know.

"The butchers and the temple staff are all involved in this illegal trade," Nath charged. "They were all over the place with ropes ready. One had about 30 strings of beads with him, which the devotees put around the calves, and which means this fellow had already handed over 30 to the butchers. These small ones are snatched from their mothers, just days old, bleating for milk, either to be made an offering or to be starved to death deliberately.

"I am pointing to the irony that these bull calves are given for religious purposes and then slaughtered," Nath emphasized. "I know it is difficult to stop the butchering as long as there is the supply of unwanted bull calves. Hindus who consider themselves religious are the ones perpetrating these acts and encouraging the slaughter trade.

"We are trying to prove to them that they are doing an illegal act that is not religious," Nath continued. "We are also trying to tell the butchers that there is a correct way to kill," if killing cattle is to be done.

"If we do not protest on behalf of the law," Nath explained of the Herculean task the Visakha SPCA took on, "then there is no law to protect even the most revered animal in India, and there will not be respect for the other animal laws either."

The intervention at the Simhachalam temple eclipsed in magnitude the apparent previous record seizure of 305 cattle from illegal traffickers by the Karuna Society for Animals & Nature, on December 15, 2003. Karuna Society president Clementien Pauws, of Puttiparthi, at the opposite end of Andhra Pradesh from Visakhapatnam, told ANIMAL PEOPLE that his organization and local police intercepted 12 truckloads of cattle in all, arresting 46 people. Three young bulls were found dead aboard the trucks, crushed by the weight of the others. Many more were injured. They had been hauled only 30 miles, Pauws said, just a fraction of their intended journey.

Dilemma

Both Pauws and the Visakha SPCA may have been surprised at the skepticism of allied humane organizations and overseas donors as to whether such large seizures represent an effective use of scarce resources, considering that the problem is endemic throughout India and will require significant cultural reformation to turn around.

"This will need all of the Visakha SPCA's energies for the next few years," Ganguly worried. "It might also mean that the place might be inundated with more unwanted cattle. Maybe you could write a moving piece about this calf issue," Ganguly suggested to ANIMAL PEOPLE, "sensitizing Hindus to what is happening in their temples. Let the villagers sell directly to the slaughterhouses, instead of assuaging their guilt by giving to a house of worship!

"I strongly advance the idea of every village having a gaushala, supported by the direct use of cattle byproducts" such as dung and biogas, Nath wrote. "We are also going to identify genuine farmers who need bullocks for farming activities, and hand them over. This way we can build a relationship within each village, which will also augur well for our work in controlling the dog populations of the villages."

In the short term, Nath said, "We have been able to convince the executive officer of the Simhachalam temple to announce that animals must not be brought up the 1,000 steps," to be dragged and pulled until they suffer broken legs. "Now they may leave the animals at the bottom, for easy access by the butchers," Nath explained.

Another festival and cattle auction was to have been held at Simhachalam on April 22, Buddhiraju wrote.

"Usually on that day the offering of bull calves is greater than usual," Buddhiraju said, "but this year we didn't find even a single calf offering."

But in the city of Jagalur two male buffalo were reportedly sacrificed on April 28 to the goddess Marikiamba. Hindus and Jains commonly raise buffalo for milk in the belief that they are exempt from the regulations pertaining to cows and their progeny. The distinction between a cow and a buffalo, however, is arbitrary: both are bovines, so closely related that they readily hybridize.

Is India not the land where cattle are worshipped, and never slaughtered by the Hindu faithful?

Why are young secular humane organizations left to do the traditional work of gaushalas, which in the strictest sense of the word shelter productive cattle found at large or donated to temples, and pinjarapoles, which look after the rest?

Why are cattle sacrificed?

Government policy

Little hope for the necessary systemic reform of the Indian cattle industry emerged from a recently published but two-year- old 1,500-page report prepared by the National Commission on Cattle, appointed by the Animal Welfare Board of India.

Indeed, if the 50 National Commission on Cattle recommendations are accepted as national policy, as AWBI chair Guman Mal Lodha urged, they will ensure that the paradox of cattle being simultaneously worshipped and the most mistreated animals in India will continue.

The political considerations behind the report can be guessed at from the timing of it. Mal Lodha, who has often proclaimed in public that he would give his life to save a cow, ceremonially delivered the report to the Agriculture Ministry in late July 2002, less than 30 days after former minister for animal welfare Maneka Gandhi was removed from her post following simultaneous high-profile battles with proponents of animal research and animal sacrifice. Many gaushala operators were glad to see Mrs. Gandhi go, as well, believing she diverted money and attention away from cattle, to benefit dogs.

Although Mrs. Gandhi has endorsed most of the recommendations made by the National Commission on Cattle, she is an outspoken critic of milk-drinking, and has often been at odds with Mal Lodha, who was a prominent Hindu nationalist conservative judge before becoming a politician

.

This would prohibit the use of the drug known in the U.S. as bovine somatatropin, BST for short, which has increased milk production per cow treated in the U.S. by an average of 22%, resulting in a corresponding reduction in the numbers of cows milked and calves born. Initially the use of BST was associated with increased mastitis and lameness in the hindquarters of the treated cows, but those problems were remedied when dairy farmers were persuaded to milk cows three times a day at times biologically appropriate for the animals, rather than the traditional twice a day at times convenient for humans.

BST accordingly has huge potential for reducing the suffering and slaughter associated with milk production, as ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out to the Animal Welfare Board of India national conference in December 1997.

National Commission recommendation #16 is that "Cross-breeding from imported cattle like Jerseys and import of such cattle should be stopped."

The purpose of this recommendation is to help conserve the traditional Indian breeds of cattle, many of which are uniquely adapted to specific regional conditions including dry habitat and high elevations. To some extent recommendation #16 is also retaliatory. Indian cattle advocates are still smarting from the 1997 disclosure that Pharmaceuticals Proteins Ltd., a branch of the Roslin Institute at Edinburgh University in Scotland, somehow obtained embryos of the rare Vechur cow and used them to develop potentially patentable "bioreactor" cattle, who can produce pharmaceutical drugs in their milk.

The smallest existing cattle breed, Vechurs are known for producing milk of very high butter fat content on a diet of only two pounds of fodder per day. A herd of fewer than 100 survives, sponsored by the Kerala Agriculture University.

National sensitivities aside, however, cross-breeding without restriction on the origins of the cattle involved offers the best longterm hope of producing as much milk as India wants while reducing the numbers of animals who are exploited.

Dogs and cows

Recalls ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett, "When we first visited India," for the 1997 Animal Welfare Board conference, "our host in Mumbai told us that the Jains we would be meeting and addressing wanted to hear about cows, so don't talk about dogs. I replied that in the U.S. we talk about cows to people who only want to hear about dogs, and so while we were in India we would talk about dogs to people who only wanted to hear about cows."

Urging India to recognize and honor moral obligations toward both cows and dogs, Maneka Gandhi founded People for Animals in 1984. She discovered, however, that despite the low status of dogs in India, and the professedly high status of cows, reforming Indian treatment of dogs was much easier.

Shown sterilization as an alternative to electrocuting or poisoning dogs en masse, India by the end of 1997 had accepted sterilization of street dogs instead of killing them as national policy. Though enforcing the policy and making it stick continues to be an uphill battle, it has held for six years against repeated legal challenge, while sterilization has markedly lowered the dog population and incidence of rabies wherever it has been vigorously attempted.

Lord Krishna

The cattle management system that emerged in the Golden Age worked well in an agrarian society, where transportation needs were adequately met by bullock carts. Female calves were added to milking herds; male calves were castrated to become bullocks.

The humane issues inherent in dairying were recognized early in the growth of the Indian civilization. The Lord Krishna himself reputedly set up the first gaushalas, or shelters for old and injured cows. Mahavira, the last of the 24 teachers who formed the Jain religion, encouraged his monks to start gaushalas and pinjarapoles in the time of the Buddha, between 500 and 600 B.C.

Over the centuries, gaushala and pinjarapole management became a traditional occupation of monks, both Jain and Hindu, and of other people with holy aspirations or pretensions. Later, gaushalas and pinjarapoles became a symbol of cultural resistance to Islamic and British conquest.

Temple-managed gaushalas held milk-giving cattle found at large to produce milk for the poor, or to sell to the faithful. Pinjarapoles looked after retired cows. Retired bullocks were usually slaughtered to help feed the meat-eating lower castes.

Certainly corruption occurred, but the traditional system worked well enough to endure with little change or challenge until the mid-20th century, when explosive urban population growth required the introduction of vehicles that could haul more food faster, farther. Even as the demand for milk increased, the utility of bullock carts fell, and the fodder formerly fed to surplus male calves and bullocks was diverted to productive dairy cattle.

Increasing demand for meat meanwhile created a growing slaughter industry. Ostensibly tolerated in concession to the Muslim and Christian minorities, cattle slaughter grew into an export trade in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. The exports more than doubled between 1977 and 1997, says the Animal Welfare Board of India.

What to do with surplus male calves had already become a national dilemma by Indian independence from British rule in 1947.

Because milk from gaushala cattle is considered especially life-giving, many of the 3,600 gaushalas then operating, according to an official government count, had already evolved from charities into profitable dairies, whose animals are deliberately bred. Many more have subsequently been founded, only to veer toward commerce, as a more stable and secure mode of employment than operating as charities. They produce surplus male calves in ever growing numbers.

Tens of thousands of surplus male calves were used during the first 25 years of Indian independence as live bait for tigers, as American and British trophy hunters shot the Indian tiger population to the verge of extinction. That ended when India banned hunting.

Starving unproductive cattle, including surplus male calves, and exposing them to disease became customary at many corrupted gaushalas and pinjarapoles, to save fodder costs and to enable the operators to sell their hides for leather. The Times of India reported in 1997 that this was the fate of up to 40% of the cattle admitted to gaushalas and pinjarapoles in the Delhi area. By then India, despite having very little legal cattle slaughter, had become a major leather exporting nation.

Following up, The Times of India reported in 2001 that 88% of the cattle who are picked up at large and are transported to Delhi-area gaushalas and pinjarapoles die within five yearsbut since many of these animals are elderly and/or diseased and injured, the high death rate would be surprising only if documentedly occurring among surplus male calves as well as among the older cattle. The The Times of India did not break the death rate down by age and gender.

The most profitable disposition of surplus male calves and other nonproductive cattle has always been selling them to slaughter. The number of cattle slaughtered in India, both legally and illegally, reportedly increased 20-fold between 1977 and 1997.

But that became, and remains, a critical source of cultural conflict. While letting cattle starve permits the pretense that God killed them, slaughtering cattle is anathema to most Hindus and Sikhs, all Jains, and Indian Buddhists.

Yet milk production requires calf production, and milk is central to the Indian food culture. Though about 40% of the Indian population still professes vegetarianism, almost none are vegan. As the cow is revered as "The mother of India," consuming milk is closely associated with Hindu ritual.

Eschewing milk, as Maneka Gandhi does, is as socially problematic in India as vegetarianism is in the U.S. For criticizing milk consumption, Mrs. Gandhi is often accused by political foes of being sacreligious and anti-patriotic, despite her long record of public service.

Milk cannot be produced without breeding cows. But breeding cows, either naturally or by artificial insemination without separating out sperm that will conceive male calves, brings a 50% chance of producing unwanted male offspring. In most of the world, that is not a problem: male calves are either slaughtered young, as veal, or are raised as beef. Cross-breeding dairy cows to produce offspring more profitably sold for beef has long been standard practice.

In India, however, observant Hindus avoid acknowledging any involvement in the beef industry, even as elaborate strategies have evolved to convey surplus male calves, dry cows, and former working bullocks to slaughter.

Muslims & slaughter

"To a genuine animal person, a chicken is a dog is a cow," says Blue Cross of India vice chair Chinny Krishna. "However, dog-eating seems to particularly disturb even non-vegetarians in the West, and likewise beef-eating is the last taboo for most Hindus. Only in Kerala and Bengal, thanks to the Communists, do common Hindus eat beef. This is why many Christian missionaries today serve beef to freshly converted Hindus soon after their conversion. This was also the practice in Mughal times, with converts to Islam," the idea being that the former Hindu who ate beef would not revert.

The Indian dairy industry requires the participation of Muslims and Christians as the brokers, transporters, killers, and butchers of surplus male calves. At the same time, the fundamentalist interpretation of Hinduism predominating among the Hindu nationalists who now govern India requires that cattle slaughter be banned, as it is in all but three states, and that participants in cattle slaughter be punished.

The usual victims of mob attacks over alleged involvement in cattle slaughter are Muslim butchers, but the butchers fight back. At least two humane investigators of illegal cattle trafficking have been killed by Muslim butchers since 2000, several others have been severely injured, and mobs led by butchers have at least twice raided pinjarapoles to recover confiscated cattle.

In the most recent such incident, on April 17, 2004, two policemen on a motorcycle tried to intercept a truckload of cattle at 3:45 a.m. in Vijay Nagar, outside New Delhi. Both policemen were injured when the truckers heaved into the road in front of them a cow whose legs were bound, The Hindu reported. A police van took up the pursuit, but was stopped when a second cow with her legs bound was thrown in front of it. The truckers then fired a shot at the police. The shot killed a sleeping roadside vendor. The truckers escaped with at least four more cows still in their vehicle.

Visakha SPCA founder Pradeep Kumar Nath has been on the receiving end of violence from Muslim butchers many times. In April 2000, raiders burned the Visakha SPCA cow shed, and in January 2004, two butchers beat Nath.

"I was brought up in a 70% Muslim area, and have many Muslim friends, and our first life member is a Muslim," Nath told ANIMAL PEOPLE, acknowledging the constant conflict, but rejecting the notion that it is inevitable.

"We blame Muslims because they kill the cattle," Nath continued, "but Hindus who use cows, buffaloes, and bulls for their economic purposes contribute to this illegal trade, which has Hindus as middlemen."

Biotechnological fix

But the surplus bull calf problem has a technological fix now, if India can be persuaded to use it.

U.S. dairy output has increased 58% per cow since 1980, from an average of 5.4 metric tons of milk per cow per year to 8.5 metric tons per cow in 2003. About 40% of the increase is attributed to the introduction of BST. The rest has come about through improvements in breeding, health care, nutrition, and going to thrice-a-day milking.

Total U.S. milk production has increased from 58 million metric tons to 77 million metric tons over the same time. Yet the U.S. national dairy herd has declined from 11 million to nine million, residing on barely more than 100,000 farms, with an average herd size of almost 90.

The increase in milk production per cow, a trend actually underway since 1950, has been paralleled by plummeting numbers of surplus male calves produced and sold for veal. U.S. veal production today is a sixth of the 1950 level, and down by half since 1980.

Total Indian milk production tripled from 1968 to 1997, but chiefly by increasing the numbers of cows (including buffalo) being milked, and has subsequently declined slightly, as regional droughts have reduced access to fodder. For several years in the late 1990s and early 21st century India edged ahead of the U.S. and proudly led the world in gross milk yield, but has since fallen back behind the U.S.

The average milk yield per cow in India has remained static at about 0.5 metric tons per year since 1993. This is the lowest yield per cow reported by any of the top 32 milk-producing nations. Even Mexican dairy cows produce approximately twice as much milk apiece, living in comparable arid habitat, amid comparable poverty.

But India now has about 35 million dairy cattle: close to 25% of the global cow population. This is up from 31 million in 1993.

That means India would now have 3.9 times as many surplus male calves to handle as the U.S., if U.S. farmers were not already vigorously limiting male births through the use of embryo transplants and sperm-sorted artificial insemination. Since these techniques have just barely been introduced in India, the actuality is worse: India may have as many as ten times the numbers of surplus male calves, with very little realistic idea what to do with them.

Inefficiency

The bull calf surplus is only symptomatic of the inefficiency of the Indian dairy industry. Overall, India has four times as many dairy cattle as the U.S., yet produces less than a third as much milk per human being. Without achieving much greater milk yield per cow, India has little realistic chance of boosting fodder production enough to sustain milk production at the peak level achieved a few years ago, let alone to increase the herd size as much as would be needed to give Indians as much milk as most would consume if they could afford to.

The only realistic answer for India is to increase milk production relative to fodder consumption, which can only be accomplished by feeding far fewer cows a much richer dietand almost certainly requires stimulating production per cow through the use of BST, as the fastest way to increase yields, while Indian dairy farmers work to develop the other methods that have contributed to the rise in output in other major producing nations.

The obstacle to increasing milk yield while decreasing herd size in India is that the 35 million Indian dairy cattle support more than 70 million members of dairy farmers' families. For many, the family cow is the most important economic capital they have, and cow-herding is among the few jobs, all of them ill-paid and menial, that they know how to do.

Formally proposing to decrease the size of the national dairy herd is accordingly politically problematic. Even illiterates vote in India, and any proposal to put dairy farmers out of business could easily be misconstrued as an attack upon the rural poor, as well as upon the teachings of Hinduism.

Taking cattle out of dairy production, moreover, would leave even more cows vulnerable to sale for slaughter.

Yet herd reduction accompanied by greater efficiency could be achieved through providing a combination of incentives to dairy farmers and their families to either produce more milk per cow and fewer unwanted bull calves, or get the training and investment capital to go into other work.

Educational and employment opportunities for rural women, in particular, need to be expanded.

Emanicipation of women

While India has always been "a nation of villages," as Mohandas Gandhi often observed, and will continue to be, India need not always be a nation of illiterate village children herding half-starved street cows, 15-year-old mothers, and 45- year-old grandmothers whose whole lives have been divided between patting chipati bread into shape and patting dung cakes to feed the fire.

The humane movement, in most nations, has evolved a generation behind the economic emancipation of women. In India, humane teachings evolved millennia before the economic emancipation of women. Nowas Maneka Gandhi has argued throughout her political careerthe humane movement and the advancement of women must evolve together. Cows will have better lives when women have better lives.

This will require accepting technological transformation that contributes to changing the economic structure of rural India more profoundly than it has changed in millennia.

Computers are part of the transformation, and are already well-accepted. So are motor vehicles. Biotechnology will be part of it too, inevitably.

The challenge ahead for the Indian humane movement is to ensure that biotechnology is introduced as a liberating force, not as adjunct to introducing western-style factory farming. This could be done, for example, by helping small- scale dairy farmers to avail themselves of the appropriate biotechnology, rather than allowing the biotechnological introduction to occur just as a matter of wealthier farmers putting the poor out of business, by adopting biotech that only the already relatively well-off can afford. Currently, the only way for poor farmers to compete is to try to increase their herd size, which requires more breedingand more fodder, and produces more bull calves. Sharing access to more milk output per cow could spare India much misery.

Under enlightened direction, India can use biotechnology to help reduce the numbers of unwanted bull calves, end cattle starvation, increase the milk supply, reduce rural poverty, and help free women to pursue more productive and fulfilling lives.

"If there is a way to have no-kill dairy production, then whatever the method, whether bio-tech or anything else, sounds quite acceptable," Ganguly told ANIMAL PEOPLE, breaking ranks with many of her peersas she often has, while building one of India's most successful humane societies. "Humans can hardly afford to sit on a high horse," Ganguly continued, "having done nothing or very little to establish ethical or even sustainable standards in farming and dairying.

"However," Ganguly added, "if bio-tech is the way forward to reduce male calves, then I think most Indian farmers cannot afford it without government subsidies. This might have to be done by adopting a few villages, to show the difference to the rest. As long as there is a population that eats beef and there is money to be made out of it," Ganguly concluded, "I fear that there will always be a ready market for all the poor male calves. If you reduce the numbers of unwanted dairy calves, farms might be started only for beef production, which might be equally ghastly."

Looking far ahead, converting India to the ethic of veganism advocated by Maneka Gandhi, among others, could accomplish much more than bio-tech to reduce cattle suffering. Whether or not veganism ever is viable in India, however, reducing the misery quotient can be achieved here and now.

"Introducing tofu and soy milk can help a bit," said Buddhiraju, "but how much the people in India will adopt this, we don't know. In some situations even I think that it is better to be slaughtered than to be hungry and be made to work like a slave," she added. "But our consciences will not accept slaughter. It is very hard to see the calves' innocent faces."

--Merritt Clifton