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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November 2006

Seeking to end sacrifice

 

KOLKATA, CAPE TOWN, LOS ANGELES--Challenging public animal sacrifice at the Kailghat Temple in Kolkata since 2000, Compassionate Crusaders Trust founder Debasis Chakrabarti won a September 15, 2006 verdict from the Calcutta High Court that the ritual killings may no longer be conducted in open public view.

The 200-year-old Kalighat temple, beside the Hoogly River, is among the most visited sites of sacrifice to the blood goddess Kali. Chakrabarti previously tried to persuade devotees that donating blood to hospital blood drives would be as acceptable to the goddess.

Anti-sacrifice demonstrations and the blood drives helped to reduce the numbers of sacrifices, Chakrabarti told news media. Moving sacrifice inside the temple walls, Chakrabarti hopes, will reinforce the message that it is not acceptable in modern India.

But the message and reality are somewhat at odds. Karnataka, Gujarat, Orissa, Himachal, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh states prohibit animal sacrifice. Yet sacrifice is exempted from coverage by the federal Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, in effect since 1960, and the Indian constitution guarantees freedom of religion.

The traditionally lesser educated castes who eat meat and practice animal sacrifice have had a much higher birth rate in recent decades than the traditionally better educated vegetarian castes. Seventy years after the caste system was officially abolished, caste lines have blurred to the point that lower caste origins are no longer an obstacle to winning economic and political success, and in some districts are even an advantage. Vegetarianism is still widely professed, but the population balance in India has shifted in the space of a generation from approximately half to less than a third actually not eating meat.

Animal sacrifice, historically used to dispose of surplus bull calves and other less productive livestock, may be practiced by more Hindus today than ever before since Vedic times.

Within two weeks of the Calcutta High Court ruling, as many as 3,000 animals were reportedly sacrificed at the 341-year-old Kakakhya temple in Guwahati.

Two hundred were killed at a temple in Satbhaya and 50 at a temple in Osanagara, both in defiance of the Orissa law. The law was unlikely to be invoked. Orissa revenue minister Manmohan Samal in March 2006 suffered only transient embarrassment after reportedly attending animal sacrifices in Rameswarpur, his home district. Samal acknowledged visiting the temple, but denied that animals were killed in his presence.

Animist sacrifice

Animal sacrifice is also increasingly visible in South Africa, though not necessarily practiced by more people. A dozen years after the collapse of apartheid and introduction of majority rule, citiizens of tribal descent are increasingly inclined to revive cultural traditions, often in conflict with neighbors of African, European and Asian descent.

The first public example was the 1992 revival of young men ritually torturing a bull to death at the annual First Fruits Festival near Nongoma in KwaZulu-Natal, described in the October 2006 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE. Exempted from prosecution as a religious exercise, the First Fruits Festival was invoked as a precedent in 2005 when Xhosa medical doctor Manduleli Bikitsha announced he would sacrifice a cow in his yard in Somerset West, a Cape Town suburb.

"The bellowing of the dying cow when slaughtered in the Xhosa ritual is indicative that the ceremony is accepted by ancestors, but to animal welfare organisations it is cruelty," explained Myolisi Gophe of The Cape Argus.

National SPCA inspector Kingstone Sizaba said the Xhosa belief is "bull and doesn't hold water. The crying (of the animal) is a sign of pain and suffering and not a communication with anybody."

Actual confrontation between the National SPCA and practitioners of animal sacrifice came in March 2006, after police officers at the Nyanga Station in Cape Town reportedly killed a goat and several chickens to ritually cleanse the premises of bad spirits occasioned by rumors about a human murder. The killing was videotaped.

"The SPCA laid a complaint," wrote Humane Education Trust founder van der Merwe in Animal Voice, the newsletter of the South African branch of Compassion In World Farming, "but the Directorate of Public Prosecutions refused to prosecute. However, the incident was raised in Parliament. Now ritual slaughter is to be regulated."

Said chair Manie Schoeman at the August 4, 2006 Constitutional Review Committee hearing, "Despite the fact that there are regulations governing kosher and halaal slaughter, no such regulations exist regarding ritual slaughter according to African custom. Twelve years since the advent of democracy, this is an intolerable situation. The Department of Agriculture is instructed by this committee to draw up such regulations."

Kapporat

By contrast, Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation chief Ed Boks' September 27 warning to practitioners of Kapporat attracted notice partly because few people had ever seen or heard of it, outside of Hassidic Jewish communities.

Explained Boks' press release, "Every year for six days before Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement on October 2) some Jews perform the ritual "Kapporat." Kapporat is a custom in which the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl. The fowl is held above the person's head and swung in a circle three times while certain words are spoken. The fowl is then slaughtered so that the person may have a good, peaceful life. Sometimes the chickens are given to the poor as food.

"Nowhere is the practice of Kapporat even mentioned in the Torah," Boks continued. "It is a pagan tradition that has been muddled into the religious practices of a small Jewish sect." Supporting statements were included from Jewish legal code historian Rabbi Joseph Caro, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Shiomo Goren, and Jewish animal advocates Karen Davis, founder of United Poultry Concerns, and Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism & Vegetarianism.

Despite Boks' advice that Kapporat might constitute prosecutable cruelty, it openly continued, with no arrests.

Psychological defense

Slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin in a 1988 landmark study titled "Behavior of slaughter plant and auction employees towards animals" used surveys to define the three basic psychological mechanisms that humans use to cope with killing.

Some people, Grandin found, distance themselves from the crying animals and any feelings of guilt, often through use of alcohol or other intoxicants. Some become sadistic. Some ritualize the proceedings, rationalizing their part with a pretense that killing is for the greater good.

Each approach can menace social and economic stability. Thus the progress of civilization itself might be measured by the success of efforts to restrain slaughter and the behavior associated with it, a topic of the earliest known legal codes.

Over time, as fewer people actively participate in slaughter, competitions to capture and kill animals have evolved into scrambles after footballs. Witnesses drink to celebrate goals, not kills. Except among some animists and practitioners of voodoo, the candle placed in a skull to chase ghosts from the doorstep where animals are slaughtered is now a jack o'lantern pumpkin.

In seeking to transform blood sacrifice into blood donation, Chakrabarti followed a history of removing slaughtering from ritual sacrifice, exemplified by substituting monetary offerings for sacrifice. This was introduced in most branches of Hinduism between 1,500 and 2,300 years ago, and in Judaism more than 500 years before the first written documentation of Kapporat.

Indeed, the first records of Kapporat were rabbinical opinions written against it.

Much of the written record pertaining to animal sacrifice in all major religious traditions describes the efforts of a few of the best educated faithful to persuade other people to give it up.

Yet animal sacrifice persists, traumatic as ever for the animal victims and the children for whom watching or participating in the killing is often a part of cultural initiation.

Defenders of animal sacrifice contend that opponents just do not understand it.

As a former child guru and as an ordained minister, respectively, Chakrabarti and Boks understand the importance of religious ritual in holding societies together.

As founder of the Humane Education Trust, instrumental in adding humane education to the national school curriculum in South Africa, van der Merwe understands the effects of cruelty witnessed in childhood on adult behavior.

Chakrabarti, Boks, and van der Merwe understand animal sacrifice. That is precisely why they seek to persuade their communities to leave it behind.--Merritt Clifton