Though sustaining solvency is self-evidently critical, we found we had
no real choice but to find out what was happening in India. Almost directly
opposite to us on the earth, scarcely anywhere could have proved more relevant
or enlightening relative to the state of humane work and wildlife conservation
in North America.
We knew already that India has the oldest recorded humane tradition,
is the only nation which constitutionally recognizes a human obligation
to treat animals kindly, has more than half the world's vegetarians, has
more native mammals and birds than any other, and is deeply involved in
the struggle to protect endangered species.
With due respect to the economic clout of Japan and sheer size of China,
we recognized as well that India may be pivotal in determining the cultural,
social, and moral direction of all Asia. India has accomplished a perhaps
unparalleled synthesis of western-style democratic government and technological
transition, still underway, with social stability, lifting a growing percentage
of her people out of dire poverty and illiteracy despite rapid population
growth that has only just begun to slow.
A big part of the Indian success may be the strength of the indigenous
humane tradition, encapsulated in the Jain notion of ahimsa, meaning
"doing no harm."
We wanted to see how philosophical and political lip service to ahimsa
translates into real-life animal control work, in a nation of ubiquitous
need. We wanted to see how the Indian tiger poaching problem compares to
the killing of North American predators by poachers, sport hunters, and
USDA Wildlife Services, formerly Animal Damage Control.
We accordingly spent two hectic weeks inspecting nature reserves, humane
societies, and gaushalas (cow shelters) from Bombay to Delhi and
back, speaking at schools, meeting with Jain religious groups, meeting
privately with Indian humane movement leaders, and attending and addressing
the Animal Welfare Board of India's National Seminar as the sole representatives
from outside India.
Our primary host among many, pediatrician and Jain vegetarian activist
Dr. Pramod Mehta, saw to it that we had little or no "down time." If there
was an open moment during the days he traveled with us, no matter how early
or late, he arranged discussions and briefings. Even time waiting for trains
was never idle, as we studied the dogs, monkeys, birds, bats, and even
cattle and goats who inhabit Indian train station environs.
But we also saw that none of this was the unchallenged rule. We saw plentiful stray dogs even in cities with active and successful Animal Birth Control programs, yet few in those cities were puppies, pregnant, or nursing, and looked as well-fed and happy as most North American pet dogsófar more so than the millions of North American dogs who spend their lives tethered and neglected.
We saw only six cats outside of shelters in over 2,000 miles of ground travel, four of the cats in just one Bombay neighborhood, which has no stray dogs to outcompete them for dumpster rations.
We saw that many roving cattle and work animals who at first glance appear to be "starving," because their ribs show, are actually far older than cows, horses, and burros usually get before being sold to slaughter in North America, and that one must look twice, closely, to distinguish actual suffering from the normal ravages of age.
We saw much abuse of the water buffalo used to draw carts, whose status is markedly less than that of cows and oxen, yet we also saw water buffalo dairy herds led through city streets to spend their afternoon recreationally bathing in a riveróa consideration with little or no parallel in modern U.S. or Canadian agriculture.
For every person we saw who acted harshly toward animals, we met someone who had dedicated significant personal resources to preventing animal sufferingólike Ratanlal Bafna, our host in Jalgaon, who funds a gaushala from his own pocket and hires teachers to discourage animal sacrifice in remote villages.
Most impressive was the growing success of the ABC programs, which fight dog overpopulation through neuter/release, much as progressive humane organizations here use neuter/release to reduce homeless cat numbers. Practiced on a significant scale in the U.S. for barely five years, for cats only, neuter/release has been used widely in India with increasingly evident good results for nearly 30 years.
The American animal care-and-control community is still incredulous that San Francisco in April 1994 was able to go to no-kill animal control via the Adoption Pact inked by the San Francisco SPCA and the San Francisco Animal Care and Control department. Many national animal advocacy organizations still insist that the San Francisco achievement is a fluke enabled only by community wealth, an impossibility for other cities, even a hoax, because irrecoverably diseased and injured animals as well as animals who have bitten someone are still killed. Yet Bombay, with 12 times the human population of San Francisco and barely a 30th the per capita income, formalized a similar agreement to handle dog control on a no-kill basis nearly four months before San Francisco did. Chennai, formerly called Madras, seven times the size of San Francisco, and no more wealthy than Bombay, adopted no-kill dog control in April 1995.
Instead of railing against the transition to no-kill, the Indian animal care-and-control community has embraced it. On November 28, 1997, the Animal Welfare Board of India formally committed itself to achieving no-kill animal control nationwide within seven years. The resolution was nonbinding, and carried no funding commitment. But it did carry moral force. The Indian government soon afterward accepted it as official policy.
Most major organizations representing the U.S. and Canadian humane communities conspicuously lack the moral resolve to drive national policy in an equivalent manner. So devoted are many to defending prevailing practice that they dare not even fairly assess alternatives. When the American Humane Association joined Doing Things for Animals in cohosting the 1996 No-Kill Conference, for instance, conventional shelter management recoiled in such alarm that the board-level aftershocks are still reverberating. When the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary at the 1997 No-Kill Conference invited animal care-and-control people to ratify a commitment to merely begin a phase-out of population control killing by 2000, representives of major conventional organizations complained from the audience microphone that no-kill people were maligning them.
The North American animal care-and-control community typically blames shelter killing on a lack of resources and an ignorant public. We know as much about public ignorance and lack of resources as anyone in the humane field: our main job is education, and few fulltime animal protection workers are as often paid late or draw lower salaries to begin with. But when we saw first-hand what institutions such as the Bombay SPCA are doing on budgets of less than the personal salaries of many U.S. humane group executives, it was clear that the real problem here is not the public nor tight resources, but rather a lack of heartfelt moral commitment at the leadership level, infecting the whole animal care-and-control infrastructure with attitudes of learned helplessness and abject confusion.
Gandhi was willing to go half-naked, if necessary, to inspire a more kindly India. No one here needs go half-naked. The North American humane community already has adequate access to resources to catch upóyes, catch upówith the progress already made in India, where half the people can't read or write. What we need here is Gandhian courage.