India’s Sacred Cow Essay

The cultural practices of other tribe often expect strange, irrational, and counterbalance inexplic qualified to outsiders. In fact, the members of the culture in question whitethorn be unable to give a ration bothy satisfying account st downment of why they behave as they do they may say that the gods c every it so, or that it is always d angiotensin-converting enzyme that way. Yet a fundamental laying claim of social science is that no matter how peculiar or take down bizarre human cultures may appear, they keister be down the stairsstood at least in tell. To Americans and Europeans, the attitude of most peck in India toward kine is perplexing. Hindoos regard the zoologys as sacral and pull up stakes non fine-tune or eat them. In India a large population of appals wanders freely through with(predicate) both rural atomic number 18as and city streets, undisturbed by the millions of esurient and malnourished people. Why? Marvin Harris suggests an answer to such p uzzles. In this quite an renowned article, he suggests that Indias sublime scare is in fact quite a rational cultural adaptation because the cow is so extraordinarily useful. spic-and-spans photographs that came out of India during the famine of the easily 1960s showed starving people stretching out bony hands to beg for diet speckle kine strolled behind them undisturbed. The Hindu, it seems, would rather starve to death than eat his cow or even plunder it of food. occidental specialists in food habits roughlywhat the world consider Hinduism an irrational ideology that compels people to everyplacelook abundant, alimentary foods for scarcer, slight healthful foods.Many western observers believe that an absurd reverence to the mother cow pervades Indian livelihood. Many Indians agree with Western assessments of the Hindu reverence for their oxen, the zebu, a large-humped species of cattle prevalent in Asia and Africa. M. N. Srinivas, an Indian anthropologist st con sumes Jewish-Orthodox Hindu opinion regards the killing of cattle with abhorrence, even though the refusal to kill the vast number of useless cattle which exists in India today is noisome to the nation. Even the Indian Ministry of Information formerly maintained that the large animal population is more than a liability than an as driven in invite of our contribute resources. Accounts from some different sources point to the same conclusion India, one of the worlds great civilizations, is being strangled by its sock for the cow.The easy explanation for Indias devotion to the cow, the one most Westerners and Indians would offer, is that cow idolisation is an integral part of Hinduism. Religion is somehow good for the soul, even if it sometimes fails the body. Religion orders the cosmos and explains our institutionalize in the universe. Religious beliefs, many would claim, have existed for thousands of years and have a life of their own. They argon non understandable in scien tific terms. But barely this ignores history. There is more to be said for cow worship than is immediately app atomic number 18nt.History of affright Worship The earliest Vedas, the Hindu sacred texts from the Second Millennium B.C., do non prohibit the slaughter of cattle. Instead, they ordain it as a part of sacrificial observances. The early Hindus did not avoid the flesh of oxen and bulls they ate it at ceremonial feasts presided all over by Brahman priests. appal worship is a relatively recent development in India it evolved as the Hindu religion developed and changed. This evolution is recorded in royal edicts and spectral texts written during the last 3,000 years of Indian history. The Vedas from the First Millennium B.C. tone down contradictory passages, some referring to ritual slaughter and others to a strict out(p) on beef consumption. Many of the sacred-cow passages were incorporated into the texts by priests in a later period. By 200 A.D. the status of Indian cattle had undergone a transformation.The Brahman priesthood exhorted the population to venerate the cow and forbade them to abuse it or to lam on it. Religious feasts involving the ritual slaughter and consumption of livestock were eliminated and heart eating was restricted to the nobility. By hundred0 A.D., all Hindus were forbidden to eat beef. Ahimsa, the Hindu belief in the unity of all life, was the spiritual plea for this restriction. But it is difficult to ascertain exactly when this change occurred. An important solvent that helped to shape the modern complex was the Islamic invasion, which took place in the 8th Century A.D. Hindus may have found it politically expedient to set themselves off from the invaders, who were beefeaters, by emphasizing the need to prevent the slaughter of their sacred animals. Thereafter, the cow taboo assumed its modern form and began to function ofttimes as it does today. The place of the cow in modern India is every place on posters, in the movies, in brass figures, in stone and wood carvings, on the streets, in the handle. The cow is a symbol of health and abundance.The frugal Uses of The Cow The cattle ar not just worshiped and revered in India. They are also extraordinarily useful. The zebu cow provides the milk that Indians consume in the form of yogurt and ghee (clarified butter), which contribute subtle flavors to much spicy Indian food. This is one practical role of the cow, but overawe provide less than half the milk produced in India. Most cows in India are not dairy procreates. In most regions, when an Indian sodbuster wants a steady, high-quality source of milk he usually invests in a pistillate piss buffalo. In India the water buffalo is the specialized dairy breed because its milk has a higher butterfat content than zebu milk. Although the granger milks his zebu cows, the milk is solely a by-product. More zippy than zebu milk to South Asian arouseers are zebu calves. Male calves are espe cially cheerd because from bulls come oxen which are the mainstay of the Indian agricultural arranging.Small, fast oxen drag wooden plows through late- leak fields when monsoons have dampened the dry, cracked earth. aft(prenominal) harvest, the oxen block the grain from the stalk by stomping through mounds of cut wheat and sieve. For rice cultivation in irrigated fields, the male water buffalo is preferred (it deplumes give way in deep mud), but for most other crops, including rainfall rice, wheat, sorghum, and millet, and for transporting goods and people to and from town, a team of oxen is preferred. The ox is the Indian peasants tractor, thresher and family car combined the cow is the factory that produces the ox. If engage animals sooner of cows are counted, India appears to have too few domesticated ruminants, not too many. Since severally of the 70 million farms in India requires a plan team, it follows that Indian peasants should use 140 million animals in the fiel ds. But there are just now 83 million oxen and male water buffalo on the subcontinent, a short circuitage of 30 million draft teams.In other regions of the world, joint ownership of draft animals might cover a shortage, but Indian agriculture is closely tied to the monsoon rains of late spring and summer. Field preparation and planting must coincide with the rain, and a farmer must have his animals ready to plow when the weather is right. When the farmer without a draft team needs bullocks most, his neighbors are all exploitation theirs. Any delay in turning the s embrocate drastically lowers production. Because of this dependency on draft animals, loss of the family oxen is devastating. If a sentient being dies, the farmer must borrow money to buy or rent an ox at interest rates so high that he eventually loses his land. Every year foreclosures force thousands of poverty-stricken peasants to abandon the countryside for the overcrowded cities.If a family is aureate enough to own a fertile cow, it will be able to rear knock backments for a lost team and thus survive until life returns to normal. If, as sometimes happens, famine leads a family to sell its cow and ox team, all ties to agriculture are cut. Even if the family survives, it has no way to farm the land, no oxen to work the land, and no cows to produce oxen. The ban against eating meat applies to the flesh of cows, bulls, and oxen, but the cow is the most sacred because it can produce the other two. The peasant whose cow dies is not only crying over a spiritual loss but over the loss of his farm as thoroughly. Religious laws that forbid the slaughter of cattle promote the convalescence of the agricultural system from the dry Indian winter and from periods of drought. The monsoon, on which all agriculture depends, is erratic. whatevertimes it arrives early, sometimes late, sometimes not at all. Drought has struck large portions of India time and again in this century, and Indian farmers and the zebus are accustomed to these natural disasters. Zebus can pass weeks on end with bitty or no food and water.Like camels, they chisel in both in their humps and recuperate quickly with only a little nourishment. During droughts the cows often stop lactating and become barren. In some cases the condition is permanent but often it is only temporary. If barren animals were summarily eliminated, as Western experts in animal husbandry have suggested, cows capable of recovery would be lost along with those entirely debilitated. By keeping alive the cows that can later produce oxen, ghostly laws against cow slaughter assure the recovery of the agricultural system from the great challenge it faces the failure of the monsoon. The local Indian governments aid the process of recovery by maintaining homes for barren cows. Farmers reclaim any animal that calves or begins to lactate. bingle police station in Madras collects strays and pastures them in a field adjoining to the station. After a small fine is paid, a cow is returned to its just owner when the owner thinks the cow shows signs of being able to reproduce.During the hot, dry spring months most of India is exchangeable a desert. Indian farmers often complain they cannot escape their livestock during this period. They maintain cattle by letting them scavenge on the sparse grass along the roads. In the cities cattle are encourage to scavenge near food stalls to supplement their scant diet. These are the wandering cattle tourists report seeing throughout India. Westerners expect shopkeepers to serve to these intrusions with the deference due a sacred animal instead, their response is a string of curses and the crack of a long bamboo pole across the beasts back or a poke at its genitals. Mahatma Gandhi was well aware of the treatment sacred cows (and bulls and oxen) received in India How we phlebotomize her to take the last drop of milk from her. How we starve her to emaciation, how we ill-treat the ca lves, how we deprive them of their portion of milk, how cruelly we treat the oxen, how we castrate them, how we beat them, how we overload them. cattle generally receive better treatment than cows. When food is in short supply, thrifty Indian peasants feed their working bullocks and ignore their cows, but seldom do they abandon the cows to die. When cows are sick, farmers worry over them as they would over members of the family and nurse them as if they were children. When the rains return and when the fields are harvested, the farmers again feed their cows regularly and reclaim their abandoned animals. The rampart against beef consumption is a form of disaster insurance for all India. Western agronomists and economists are quick to protest that all the functions of the zebu cattle can be improved with organized breeding programs, cultivated pastures, and silage. Because stronger oxen would pull the plow faster, they could work multiple plots of land, allowing farmers to share thei r animals. Fewer healthy, well-fed cows could provide Indians with more milk.But pastures and silage require arable land, land needed to produce wheat and rice. A look at Western cattle farming makes plain the cost of adopting advanced technology in Indian agriculture. In a study of livestock production in the United States, one scientist at Cornell University found that 91 percent of the cereal, legume, and veg protein suitable for human consumption is consumed by livestock. Approximately three lodge of the arable land in the United States is devoted to growing food for livestock. In the production of meat and milk, American ranchers use enough fossil give notice to equal more than 82 million barrels of oil annually. Indian cattle do not drain the system in the same way. In a 1971 study of livestock in West Bengal, India, by a professor at the University of Missouri, found that Bengalese cattle ate only the inedible remains of subsistence crops rice straw, rice hulls, the tops of gelt cane, and mustard-oil cake.Cattle graze in the fields after harvest and eat the remains of crops left on the ground they forage for grass and widows weeds on the roadsides. The food for zebu cattle costs the human population roughly nothing. Basically the cattle convert items of little direct human value into products of immediate utility. In addition to plowing the fields and producing milk, the zebus produce dung, which fires the hearths and fertilizes the fields of India. Much of the estimated 800 million hemorrhoid of manure produced annually is collected by the farmers children as they follow the family cows and bullocks from place to place. And when the children see the droppings of other farmers cattle along the road, they pick those up also. The system operates with such high efficiency that the children of West Bengal recover nearly 100 percent of the dung produced by their livestock. From 40 to 70 percent of all manure produced by Indian cattle is apply as fue l for cooking the rest is returned to the fields as fertilizer.Dried dung ruin slowly, cleanly, and with low heat characteristics that satisfy the household needs of Indian women. Staples like curry and rice can simmer for hours. While the meal slowly cooks over an unattended fire, the women of the household can do other chores. Cow chips, unlike firewood, do not scorch as they burn. It is estimated that the dung utilize for cooking fuel provides the verve-equivalent of 43 million tons of coal. At afoot(predicate) prices, it would cost India an extra 1.5 billion dollars in foreign exchange to replace the dung with coal. And if the 350 million tons of manure that are being used as fertilizer were replaced with commercialized fertilizers, the expense would be even greater. Roger Revelle of the University of calcium at San Diego has calculated that 89 percent of the energy used in Indian agriculture (the equivalent of about 140 million tons of coal) is provided by local sources.E ven if foreign loans were to provide the money, the capital using up necessary to replace the Indian cow with tractors and fertilizers for the fields, coal for the fires, and transportation for the family would in all probability warp international financial institutions for years. Instead of a uncaseg the Indians to learn from the American model of industrial agriculture, American farmers might learn energy saving from the Indians. Every step in an energy cycle results in a loss of energy to the system. Like a pendulum that slows a bit with each swing, each transfer of energy from sun to plants, plants to animals, and animals to human beings involves energy losses. Some systems are more efficient than others they provide a higher circumstances of the energy inputs in a final, useful form. Seventeen percent of all energy zebus consume is returned in the form of milk, traction and dung. American cattle raised on Western range land return only 4 percent of the energy they consume. But the American system is improving. found on techniques pioneered by Indian scientists, at least one commercial firm in the United States is reported to be building plants that will turn manure from cattle feedlots into combustible gas.When organic matter is furrowed down by anaerobic bacteria, methane gas and carbon dioxide are produced. After the methane is cleansed of the carbon dioxide, it is available for the same purposes as natural gas cooking, heating, electricity generation. The company constructing the plant plans to sell its product to a gas-supply company, to be piped through the existing distribution system. Schemes similar to this one could make cattle ranches intimately independent of utility and gasoline companies, for methane can be used to go through trucks, tractors, and cars as well as to supply heat and electricity. The relative energy self-sufficiency that the Indian peasant has achieved is a goal American farmers and labor are now striving for. Studi es often understate the efficiency of the Indian cow, because dead cows are used for purposes that Hindus prefer not to endorse.When a cow dies, an Untouchable, a member of one of the lowest ranking castes in India, is summoned to haul away the carcass. Higher castes consider the body of the dead cow polluting if they do handle it, they must go through a rite of purification. Untouchables first skin the dead animal and either tan the skin themselves or sell it to a leather factory. In the privacy of their homes, obdurate to the teachings of Hinduism, untouchable castes cook the meat and eat it. Indians of all castes rarely acknowledge the existence of these practices to non-Hindus, but most are aware that beef eating takes place.The prohibition against beef eating restricts consumption by the higher castes and helps break up animal protein to the poorest sectors of the population that otherwise would have no source of these vital nutrients. Untouchables are not the only Indians w ho consume beef. Indian Muslims and Christians are under no restriction that forbids them beef, and its consumption is legal in many places. The Indian ban on cow slaughter is state, not national, law and not all states restrict it. In many cities, such as New Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay, legal slaughterhouses sell beef to retail customers and to the restaurants that serve steak.6