Who will bell the cow?
The video below came by on my social media this morning. It seems to be a retail store on a busy street somewhere in India, and business seems to have been interrupted by a couple of cows dropping in to check out the wares. Even by India’s exotic standards, this is a little over the top. So what’s going on?
India has from ancient times had an open and welcoming attitude towards new ideas and thoughts. This is a country where people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages have coexisted peacefully (most of the time) for centuries. ‘Live and let live’ about sums it up.
But something has changed over the last few years. The majority of Indians are Hindus, and they have been feeling a bit worried about Hindus being sidelined, which has led to a Hindu government coming to power in India.
Now the cow is a sacred animal for Hindus.
And one way the Hindu government has flexed its muscles is by imposing a ban on the slaughter of cows. It’s now against the law to kill cows and eat beef in most states of India, with only a few like Kerala in the south, and some in the northeast holding out.
Unfortunately, this ban has let the genie out of the bottle. Emboldened by the ban, Hindu fanatics have taken the law into their hands. They have been several incidents of lynching and beating up of anyone suspected of slaughtering cows or eating beef.
The problem is life is a balancing act. Rats clean up human garbage. Snakes eat the rats. Cats eat the rats. If we interfere with this ecosystem and say kill the snakes, there will be a trade-off, which in this case, is an increase in the rat population.
Likewise, the cow population explosion is a trade-off for the ban on cow slaughter, which has sent most beef eaters into hiding. Cows that are not useful are no longer killed for their meat. Instead, they are just let loose out on to the streets and survive however they can. Even productive cows are allowed to wander unshackled on the road to forage for food, as their owners know no one will dare touch them.
The Indian government should have foreseen the problems of enforcing a blanket ban against cow slaughter. Now the ball is in their court, and they need to come up with solutions, as time is running out. These stray cows are now multiplying fast, and not just harmlessly wandering into roadside shops. They are actually becoming a deadly hazard on Indian roads.
An old gentleman in our colony was killed the other night when he rounded a blind corner on his two-wheeler and crashed head-on into a massive black cow idly chewing cud in the middle of the dark road. I know that cow was chewing cud because that was exactly what it was doing when I nearly ran into it in the same place, just a few days earlier.
All I can say is, “Holy Cow, is a human’s life worth less than a cow’s?”
