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Mon 9 Jun, 2008 09:40 pm
India Cow Killer Bagged, but Deaths Continue
All Things Considered, June 9, 2008 ยท Cows in India's cities have been suffering from a strange malady.
Back in 2000, a senior police official in Lucknow, India, announced that cows in his city were mysteriously dying of some kind of new wasting disease. No one could explain why, but normally healthy cows were being released, as usual, into the city's streets to graze on garbage. Yet they were getting skinnier and weaker, and then dying of what appeared to be starvation.
They were eating and yet they were starving, said the police official. He wondered why.
A Look Inside
A group of very ill cows was taken to a local veterinary hospital, anaesthetized and surgically examined. It turned out, says Indian journalist Subhash Mishra, that inside their stomachs was an extraordinary number of plastic bags. "More than 50, 60 bags," per cow, he recalls.
Thin plastic garbage bags are a recent innovation in India, where trash collection is still haphazard. Cows were apparently eating fruit and vegetable garbage tucked into plastic.
The bags, state authorities said, were gathering in the cows' stomachs ?- cows have four ?- to the point that food could no longer be absorbed and digested. In some of the sample cows, there were pounds of plastic engorged in their stomachs.
The Solution?
In a Hindu country, cows are sacred animals; whatever causes harm to a cow must be stopped. So in Lucknow, a movement to ban plastic bags began. The movement caught on. A bill was proposed in India's parliament. The plastics industry, naturally alarmed, proposed an alternate solution: Instead of banning plastic bags, why not require better, thicker plastic bags?
Thicker plastic bags weigh more and are more valuable to ragpickers ?- a caste of people in India who collect garbage.
A law was passed. But the plastics industry ignored the law and continued to make thin bags.
Around the country, stories were told of government officials and police officers trying to enforce the thicker bag rule, by going through stores with an instrument that weighed the thickness of plastic bags in microns. The ruling deemed that any bag 20 microns or less was banned. But how could shopkeepers distinguish a 20-micron bag from a 21-micron bag?
In the end, plastic makers continue to make thin bags, shopkeepers continue to use them, and cows continue to die from eating them.
And so, like everywhere else in the world, you discover that what people say is one thing ?- but what they do is often something different.
If I get reincarnated, I wanna be an Indian Cow, or my cat, cuz I ain't just sure how it works...
RH
I was a cow, once. But, it's more fun getting incarnated as a human.
You know edgar, I was listening to that very story yesterday on NPR, and sat in a parking lot of a store, wasting gas, to hear the end of it.
I was following along, interested in how they would solve the plight of the cows, when, in the end, nothing happened.
It made me wonder how much the "average" person in India really respected the animal.
For instance, one shop keeper was saying how he would see a cow go after a bit of mango in a bag, and eat the bag as well, because in his words, the cow was "over hungry".
So, if the cow is so revered, why a people not feeding the urban cows so they don't become over hungry? The owners let them loose on the street every day, leaving it up to chance they find enough to eat.
The plan of reducing plastic was pretty thorough, even to the point of wanting to print some kind of label on the thicker bags to show they were the proper type, but no one adhered.
So, is the sacred cow just that? Something everyone says they respect, but privately can't be bothered?
I think you pretty much got to the point, Chai. Indians are flushing down the toilet the core of their culture for Western style commerce.
How awful, consuming all those plastic bags and dying that way.
The other beef I had with the story was the reporter-- Robert Krowlwich (sp?), he's to light and snappy to report on something like that, completely inappropriate in my view. By the end of the story it became a quaint anecdote, nothing more.
I have read, although i cannot vouch for the accuracy of the contention, that the cows of India are a greater resource when they are not slaughtered. They provide milk, of course, and their manure has long been used on the fields, and when dried, as fuel. Among the tribesmen of east Africa, the ownership of cattle was a symbol of status, so they would not slaughter them. In lean times, they'd make a small slit in the neck, and drink the blood, but not taking enough to injure the animal's health.
And so, like everywhere else in the world, you discover that what people say is one thing ?- but what they do is often something different
All I can do is repeat the final words in that article. Modern humankind has sold its soul (or whatever you want to call it) for consumerism.
The Indian culture is rich, dramatic, imbalanced, utterly gorgeous and chaotic--always. The place is filled with mystery and spiritualism, ancient religions, but when it comes to regulation, I just don't think it's worked its way into their collective pysche-- it's not America, where we mess up plenty, but this would be unacceptable.
First off, we'd never have cows in the cities cause health laws, but if we did, every animal rights activist would swoop down and put a halt to it-- they'd them off to someone who owns a farm for abused cows and they'd live out their lives to ripe old age.
BANG!!!
Beef backstraps!!!
I work in IT and thus work with lots of Indians, many who are vegetarian. Some will eat chicken, maybe a little fish.
I love to tease them about how they inadvertently ate beef (or actually did). "Did you like the onion soup? I wonder how many beef bones they had to simmer to get that rich stock!"
At one of our clinics, I'd say about 85% of the staff are Indians.
I was up there once when they had ordered a group luncheon.
I remember thinking....oh this is great. I'm not that hungry, but with some vegetables, rice and other stuff I can make a light meal.
When the food arrived, it was beef barbeque, jerked pork and other nasty stuff like heavy potato salad and macaroni salad.
I was the only one that avoided the meat, and ate some cole slaw and pinto beans.
Those were American Indians.....
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