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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2007

Editorial feature--Indian diets & the future of animal welfare

 

Old news and ancient history have rarely been more relevant to the future of animal protection than in Chennai, India, in early January 2007.

Approximately 350 delegates attended the fourth Asia for Animals conference. Representing more than 20 nations, many delegates had never before been to India. Yet the journey was a philosophical pilgrimage, the conference itself a homecoming.

India is where pro-animal religious and philosophical teachings apparently began, where animal shelters and hospitals were invented.

India is also the second most populous nation in the world, with the fastest-expanding economy, greatest rate of growth in material acquisition, and second-greatest rate of growth in meat consumption, behind only China.

India and China, having between them more than 40% of the global human population, are where the future of animal welfare will be decided.

Asia for Animals 2007 added two days of activity to the schedules of past editions held in Manila (2001), Hong Kong (2003), and Singapore (2005).

A pre-conference seminar promoted improvement in the Animal Birth Control programs, the nine-year-old Indian national strategy for sterilizing and vaccinating street dogs.

A post-conference session formed a steering committee chaired by Arpan Sharma of the New Delhi ABC program Samrakshan to organize a proposed new national umbrella for Indian animal welfare societies. While the government-appointed Animal Welfare Board of India partially funds and loosely guides the activities of the 2,365 currently recognized Indian pro-animal organizations, through a traditional from-the-top-down structure, the new umbrella would seek to provide the cause with a representative collective voice.

The meeting convened in the auditorium of the C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation, near a stone that marks where advocates for Indian independence from Britain published their first newspaper. Few examples of articulating nonviolent ideals have had a greater influence.

One example that did, however, came between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago, when the Bishnoi people of the Rajasthan desert, and their neighbors, the Thari and Sindhi, adopted vegetarianism and the belief that animals should never be harmed.

Only traces of the Thari and Sindhi vegetarian cultures persist among their descendants today, many of whom are Muslim residents of Pakistan, but the Bishnoi culture appears to be almost unchanged, tolerating wildlife to the extent that Bishnoi villages serve as mini-wildlife sanctuaries.

Similar teachings were advanced by the Jains. The Jain teacher Mahavir and his contemporary Siddharta Gautama, called the Buddha, emphasized vegetarianism and compassion for animals. Mahavir is credited with either introducing or popularizing the cow shelters, called gaushalas or pinjarapoles, that have been a feature of Indian life ever since.

International animal advocacy outreach appears to have begun circa 250 B.C., when the Buddhist emperor Asoka enshrined animal protection in the Indian civil code, and sent his son Arahat Mahindra on a missionary expedition to Sri Lanka. On arrival, Arahat Mahindra interrupted a hunt by King Devanampiyatissa, persuading him to give up hunting and create a wildlife sanctuary. Both Asoka and Arahat Mahindra sent emissaries on to Thailand.

The legacy of those times is troubled, but still very much alive.

Asia for Animals 2007 speakers discussed, among other topics, the misuse of Bishnoi habitat by poachers, including the actor and onetime World Wildlife Fund calendar conservationist Salman Khan. Animal Welfare Board of India president R.M. Kharb focused on updating and revitalizing cow shelter management. Some speakers also addressed the perversion of the Buddhist custom of temple monks sheltering animals into the practice of keeping elephants and other species as visitor attractions.

Pro-animal outreach of note from India resumed in the 12th century A.D. with the Cathari, a vegetarian sect probably descended from the Thari. Cathar teachings spread from Persia through Europe from the Balkans to France, undercutting support for the Catholic Church, until the Church exterminated them in the Albigensian Crusade of 1233 and founded the Inquisition to ensure that Cathar ideas were permanently repressed.

Already the Cathari had profoundly influenced St. Francis (1182-1226), and Richard of Wyche (1197-1253), a Bishop of Chichester who attacked the morality of slaughter and appears to have been the first English animal rights advocate.

Six hundred years later, British military officers posted to India encountered pro-animal teachings and returned to England to found the London Humane Society in 1824, re-chartered in 1840 as the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals.

In 1947, at request of Rukmini Devi Arundale, who later became the founding chair of the Animal Welfare Board of India, and with the approval of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharal Nehru wrote into the constitution of India that "It shall be the fundamental duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the Natural Environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for all living creatures." This provision remains unique in national constitutions.

Indian moral leadership on behalf of animals has not yet extended to international institutional leadership, but that may be changing, as Indian animal advocates increasingly discover through conferencing and electronic networking that they have more expertise than they tend to imagine.
Restoring vegetarian prestige

Asia for Animals 2007 focused, like past editions, on the challenges and opportunities resulting from the explosive growth of the Asian human population, and the even faster recent growth of Asian economies. The Indian population, for instance, has more than tripled since 1947, while the total value of the Indian economy has doubled since 1990.

Apprehension of what might happen to animals if factory farming continues to displace traditional farming, and if Asians eat more meat, often expressed at past Asia for Animals conferences, largely yielded in 2007 to recognition that the displacement has already occurred, for the most part, along with the feared rapid rise in meat consumption.

Even in India, where more than half the human population professed to vegetarianism just 20 years ago, barely a third are vegetarian today. There are more vegetarians in India today than ever, but they tend to belong to the Brahmin, Jain, and Buddhist minorities, whose birth rates are much lower than the birth rates of non-vegetarians.

Inevitably, billions more animals will be raised and killed in miserable conditions. Already nearly 50 billion animals per year go to slaughter, worldwide, more than 90% of them chickens. This total could double before the Indian and Chinese human populations and meat consumption stabilize.

Dismaying as all this is to people who care about animals, who had hoped for better, there may have been little that animal advocates could have done to prevent it. Only after the existing demand is satiated are vegetarian and vegan advocates likely to persuade meat-eaters to reject the opportunity to eat as much meat as they always imagined they wanted.

Of greater concern to the longterm prognosis for weaning the world away from meat, animal advocates until recently lacked arguments against increased production and consumption of meat that resonated as well in Asia as in better fed parts of the world.

People who have already rejected Hindu or Buddhist vegetarian teachings, for instance, are unlikely to be swayed by other moral and philosophical contentions.

People who have felt they often did not get enough to eat tend to be oblivious to arguments based on the health effects of overconsumption.

Arguments against animal husbandry in societies where plant crops are produced mainly by hard hand labor tend to sound to the hungry poor like prescriptions for more difficult work and less to eat.

The Animal Welfare Board of India in December 1997 marked the 50th year of Indian independence by holding a conference in Delhi that marked the first meeting of many of the Asia for Animals 2007 participants. Speaker after speaker described the potential impacts of factory farming and the introduction of biotechnology to India. Some accurately anticipated the corrosive effect that the growth of the Indian biotechnology sector would have on protections for laboratory animals.

Yet the only recommendation offered for countering either factory farming or biotechnology was that animal advocates should endorse and promote traditional agricultural methods that had already failed to produce adequate abundance.

Promoting vegetarianism, which could feed the world with vastly less animal suffering and less demands on resources, was in 1997 cripplingly linked to Gandhian notions that the modern world can still rely on bullock carts and biogas for transportation and energy, and that the cost of improving animal welfare must be renouncing technological progress. Cows' urine was offered as a panacea for practically every ailment that biotech might address.

Implicit in the Gandhian arguments, resoundingly made by elderly men in homespun clothing, was the expectation that India would always need to find work for millions of poorly paid illiterate field hands, and that shaping dung cakes for fuel might always be the most lucrative work available to uneducated rural women.

Perceiving themselves as defenders of the poor, the Gandhians reduced the potential for improving animal welfare to such matters as abolishing cow slaughter, with scant attention to the plight of other species; reforming the management of cow shelters; and equipping work animals with more comfortable harnesses.

Such efforts are still needed throughout much of India, but do not even recognize most of the biggest current Indian animal welfare problems. Cow slaughter and cow shelter mismanagement are only some of the abuses involved in the fast-growing Indian leather trade. Runaway expansion of the Indian poultry industry accounts for most of the increase in Indian meat consumption. And whatever the value of cows' urine, still touted by devotees of Ayurvedic medicine, India has become a world leader in pharmaceutical animal testing.

Two years after the 1997 Animal Welfare Board conference, hoof-and-mouth disease spread from India with the illegal export of livestock for slaughter in Saudi Arabia at the Feast of Atonement after the haj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The outbreak apparently spread throughout the world on soiled shoes and clothing as pilgrims returned home, devastating the cattle industry in much of western Europe, especially Britain.

International outbreaks of Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome and the H5N1 avian influenza followed, the latter still raging.

Now the lesson is clear that if factory farming is to be practiced successfully in Asia, maintaining bio-security is essential. In practical terms, that requires abolishing a multitude of abusive traditional customs, including live markets and shipping live animals for slaughter, rather than frozen carcasses. Slaughter must be faster and cleaner. Wild meat markets must be closed, since bringing wildlife into proximity with livestock introduces exotic diseases, like SARS, which can swiftly mutate.

 

Cockfighting, falconing, and the trade in capturing or raising birds for temple release are all disease vectors associated with the spread of H5N1, in particular, and also must be ended, if poultry bred for rapid growth at expense of their immune systems are to be raised successfully in close confinement.

Suddenly agribusiness and animal advocates have some common concerns.

Agribusiness is also beginning to realize that continuing intensive confinement husbandry requires becoming more concerned about animal welfare, simply because stressed animals are much more vulnerable to infection.

Factory farming, in India and elsewhere, can now be addressed with a three-part strategy: welcoming agribusiness support to eliminate other animal-abusive industries, encouraging reform of agribusiness practices, and promoting vegetarianism and/or veganism to younger consumers, who never felt deprived of meat and so can more easily give it up.

India was never even close to fully vegetarian. "Tribals," lower caste Hindus, and the Muslim minority have always eaten meat. Yet, until quite recently, not eating meat was a mark of education and status. Giving up meat was a way to rise in social standing.

None of the Gandhian dogmatists attended Asia for Animals 2007. Perhaps they have now all passed on. The conference undoubtedly ran more smoothly without them. They probably would have readily agreed with younger activists, however, that restoring the prestige of vegetarianism in Indian culture will be the pre-eminent challenge to the Indian animal welfare cause in the coming years.