What can be done?

[Guest guest]

> >> Meat stalls are here to stay... You and I know there is nothign

>much that can be done

 

I don't know any such thing. Much of the world long ago

learned how to effectively regulate the locations and waste disposal

practices of butcher shops and slaughterhouses, so as to minimize

the nuisances associated with them.

 

India may lag behind in this regard because relatively few

Indians have eaten much meat until recent times. Fewer butcher shops

dismembering fewer carcasses meant there was a much smaller issue to

deal with. Politicans could ignore it more easily.

 

But that scarcely means India cannot come to grips with the issue now.

 

Britain began to regulate butcher shops & slaughterhouses for

similar reasons in Elizabethan times, when dogfighting and

bear-baiting were the national sports.

 

Similar regulations took hold in the U.S. between 1900 and

1916, for the most part.

 

This isn't a humane issue. It's a public sanitation issue &

a public health issue.

 

 

> >> waste management - thats something that we can actually end up doing

 

I have seen much of India make enormous progress in this

regard since my first visit, in 1997. Obviously there is some

distance yet to go. I am optimistic, though, that I will live to

see littering and other forms of public waste disposal become as

socially unacceptable in India as they became in the U.S. after Lady

Bird Johnson, wife of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, made

opposition to littering her hallmark personal issue.

 

When I was a lad, U.S. roadsides looked much like Indian

roadsides, & 30% of the dogs in the U.S. were street dogs,

according to the most comprehensive dog population study done in the

1950s.

 

That changed so fast that most Americans today are unaware

that we ever had street dogs.

 

 

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