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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: July-August 2007

Even "Shangri-La" needs animal sanctuaries & rabies control

 

THIMPHU, Bhutan--Touring the U.S. to raise support for the Jangsa Animal Saving Trust, Lama Kunzang Dorjee hesitated to call his work in Bhutan uniquely difficult.

Yes, Kunzang acknowledged, it is difficult coordinating the activities of half a dozen animal sanctuaries scattered throughout a nation which is still connected mainly by footpaths, especially when dozens of long-horned bullocks have to be moved to and from their summer pastures over swaying single-file suspension bridges--but all of the Jangsa locations are now connected by mobile telephone, Kunzang quickly added.

Yes, the Jangsa Animal Saving Trust needs money, Kunzang explained. Money is needed to start an Animal Birth Control program in the capital city of Thimphu. This will be modeled after the Animal Birth Control program directed by Help In Suffering veterinarian Naveen Pandey in Darjeeling, India. Money is needed for equipment, vehicles, vaccines, and surgical supplies, all of which must be imported.

But, Kunzang continued, fellow Bhutanese donate most generously in support of the Jangsa programs. Unlike American animal advocates, Kunzang said, he has little difficulty explaining to fellow citizens what he is doing, and why.

Kunzang showed slides and video clips of villagers walking miles to contribute baskets of corn to monks who trek throughout the nation, seeking alms for the animals. They have little difficulty convincing people to donate what they can, Kunzang said. The only problem is that the Bhutanese mostly do not have very much to give.

Bhutan, with just 675,000 residents and 24 indigenous dialects, is among the world's poorest, least populated and least accessible nations, with a literacy rate of under 50%. Yet the entire nation is by ethic and tradition a quasi-animal sanctuary. About 75% of the Bhutanese are Buddhists; most of the rest are Hindus. Ethnic tension simmers between the 80% of the people who practice mostly vegetarian forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and the 20% who are Tibetan refugees, or are descended from Tibetan refugees, and--though also Buddhists--eat meat.

Archery is the national sport. Hunting, however, is strictly forbidden. Depredations by tigers and elephants are much feared, but Bhutanese tradition, Kunzang explained, holds that tigers and elephants are the elders of the forest, who must be respected, lest they do even more harm.

Two-thirds forested, mostly more than a kilometer above sea level, Bhutan was entirely closed to the outside world until 1961, and is still hard to visit. The mystic city of Shambhala, mentioned in Buddhist literature more than 1,600 years ago, has been variously identified with places in Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, and India.

The "Shangri-La" created by novelist James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933), based on the Shambhala legend, drew heavily from Hilton's experience in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, at the western end of the Himalayas while Bhutan is at the eastern end, but even then Bhutan was a closer match to "Shangri-La," to the extent of western knowledge.

Just one small airport serves Bhutan, at Thimphu. Paved roads link the major towns, but motor vehicles are scarce.

As poaching and deforestation intensify in Assam, India, according to Kunzhang, Assamese wild animals are fleeing into Bhutan, seeking refuge at higher elevations.

Bhutan has so far escaped violent insurrections fueled by poaching, such as have devastated the wildlife of both Assam and Nepal. Hoping to avoid any spill-over of the Nepalese violence, Bhutan banned the Nepalese language in 1988 and deported many alleged Nepalese immigrants.

More than 90% of the Bhutanese population farms the less than 10% of the land that can be cultivated, relying on bullock power to do whatever cannot be done with human muscle. Most of the activity of the Jangsa Animal Saving Trust involves looking after retired working bullocks, many of them lame or blind.

Typically Jangsa receives the bullocks after the death of the farmer who used them. As aging widows cannot cut and carry the foliage needed to feed their deceased husbands' bullocks in the winter, when grass is scarce, they traditionally either donate the animals to monasteries, sell them to local butchers, or sell them to traders who walk them down the mountains to be slaughtered in Darjeeling, India.

"The Jangsa Animal Saving Trust," the organization's brochure recounts, "was established in 2000 by Lama Kunzang Dorjee, after a personal experience where he encountered five bulls who had come to seek refuge in the Jangsa Dechen Choling monastery, where he is the resident head lama. These bulls had escaped from a slaughterhouse and had been miraculously drawn toward the lama's monastery.
"Presently," the brochure adds, "the Trust maintains about 600 bulls, 40 yaks, 137 pigs, 23 sheep, two goats, and nine ducks in the eastern and northern region of Bhutan. There are also 10 goats, two buffalo, and two pigs cared for in a village near Kalimpong in the hills of West Bengal, India. A further 58 bulls have found a home in Siliguuri.

"At the monastery in Kalimpong, where Lama Kunzang resides, 10 bulls and a cow have found refuge from the butcher's axe. A pond at the monastery has hundreds of saved fish, and is a big attraction for visitors and children."

Kunzang cites as his inspiration his teacher Chatral Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist whose work was praised by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk (1915-1968) whose writings helped to introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the U.S.

Attending the AR-2007 conference in Anaheim, visiting ANIMAL PEOPLE, the NOAH Center, Pasado's Safe Haven, and Pigs Peace in the Seattle area, and visiting the Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah, among other stops on his U.S. tour, Kunzang promoted Compassionate Action, an anthology by and about Chatral Rinpoche edited by Zach Larson. (122 pages, paperback, $14.95, from Snow Lion Publications, P.O. Box 6483, Ithaca, NY 14851.) Relatively little of Compassionate Action addresses meat-eating and human duties toward animals, but the pages that do are emphatic in rejecting interpretations of Buddhism that accept meat consumption.

Now approximately 95 years old, Chatral Rinpoche has long spent whatever money comes his way to purchase fish and birds from markets and release them back to the wild. Practiced as a spiritual and compassionate exercise by devotees of many religions for at least 2,500 years, purchase-for-release tends to be counterproductive, since it gives incentive to the sellers to capture and sell more animals. In recent years purchase-for-release has also been recognized as one of the major means by which non-native animals are introduced to new habitats, much to the consternation of conservationists whose emphasis is on protecting native species, rather than on practicing compassion.

The Jangsa Animal Saving Trust is finding more practical and ecologically compatible means of exemplifying Chatral Rinpoche's teachings. The Thimphu ABC project will be the most ambitious Jangsa project yet, seeking to sterilize and vaccinate approximately 7,000 dogs, to eradicate rabies outbreaks that killed three Bhutanese in 2006.

Rabies has also occurred recently in the towns of Chukha, Samtse, Sarbang, Samdrup Jongkhar, Mongar, Trashiyangtse, and Trashigang. The latter three have each had recent human rabies deaths.
Kunzang wants to extend ABC service to these communities, too--after demonstrating in the national capital that it works.

[Contact: Jungshina, P.O. Box 314, Thimphu, Bhutan; 975-2-323949; <lamakunzang@yahoo.com>; <www.animalsavingtrust.org>.]