Indian diets & the future of animal welfare

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, 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 (see page one) 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.

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

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Fax: 360-579-2575

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