Turning from the people and the cattle within their gates to Government's experimental work on Government farms, we find one world-contribution. They have solved a main domestic problem of low latitudes--how to get milk for the babies.
Only those who have lived in the tropics are likely to appreciate what this means, in terms of family security, health and happiness. In the Philippines our own hopeful work was nipped in the bud by the Filipiniza-tion of the Agricultural Department. From that day, cattle-breeding became a farce, played out in office chairs by vague young men spinning webs of words learned by rote in one or another American college, while a few rough and neglected animals wearied out a beggar's existence in the corral. And so, as far as colonial America is concerned, the old notion still reigned--that the cow can neither be bred nor led to give real milk, in real quantity, in the tropics.
In other words, our work in that field is yet to do.
But the British in India have given us a tremendous lift and encouragement to effort. On the Imperial Dairy Farm at Bangalore their breeding experiments have conclusively proved that, with skill, care and persistence, a cow can be developed that will stand up against the tropical climate for fifteen lactations and still produce well, doing her duty as a human life-saver. In the Government Military Dairy Farm at Lucknow, I saw "Mongia," a half-bred cow. sired by an imported American Friesian on a native dam of the Punjab Hariana stock. Mongia, with her eighth calf, had given 16,000 pounds[1] of milk in a lactation period of 305 days. With her seventh calf she gave 14,800 pounds. "Edna," another of the herd, had reached a production of 15,324 in 305 days. Butter-fat, with these sturdy half-breeds, runs from 4.05 per cent, in full lactation to about 5.05 per cent, during hottest weather, which is beyond even our American home requirements.
[1. 2.15 pounds of milk make a quart]
Again, these cows' milk production drops scarcely at all in hot weather. Edna began her 1925 lactation in August, starting off at a steady seventy-pound daily yield. Edna and Mongia are, to be sure, admittedly stars; but the average daily production of the Lucknow herd of 105 milking cows of Indo-western crosses was twenty-one pounds per capita, and the work is yet young.
The best milch breed native to India is the Saniwal, of the Punjab, which averages only 3,000 pounds a lactation period, and is too small to be usefully crossbred with our big western milch stock. But Government within the last ten years have developed on their farm in Pusa a cross-breed of Saniwal with Montgomery, a second Punjabi strain, that has more than doubled the previous Saniwal record, while further interesting experiments, as of crossing native Sindi stock with imported Ayrshires, are in course of development at other Government breeding stations.
The significance of all this may be measured in part by the fact that over 90 per cent. of the cows in India give less than 600 pounds of milk a year, or less than a quart a day.[2]
[2. The Gospel and the Plow, London, 1921. Samuel Higginbottom, p. 69.]
Government began experiments in the year 1912, Then came the Great War, preventing the bringing of animals from abroad. Directly the war was over, Government imported from America, for the Lucknow farm, two more Friesian bulls, "Segis" and "Elmer." Other experimental stations were similarly supplied, and the work went on.
Enough has now been accomplished to prove that stamina goes with the half-breed, and that, beyond the fifty-fifty point, imported blood weakens the result, creating extra-susceptibility to the many diseases of the country. Every cow over half-blood, therefore, is now bred back to a native bull.
Thus, by selective breeding, by crossing, and by better feeding and housing, slowly and steadily the results of centuries of inbreeding, starvation, infection, and of breeding from the worst are being conquered; definite pedigree types are being fixed; and the foundations of distinct breeds are building.
The trail is opened, the possibilities revealed. When the people of India are ready to accept it, their profit is ready to their hand.
Cattle-lovers, at this point, will be interested in the fact that India demands a dual-purpose cow, but that "dual purpose," in India, signifies, not the combination upon which some of us in America look askance--milk and beef, but--milk and muscle!
The sale of cattle as beef is small; the price of beef in Lucknow in 1926 was two cents a pound. The Indians' use for a cow, aside from her religious contribution earlier described, is to produce, first, milk and butter; second, dung to be used as fuel or to coat the floors and walls of their dwellings; and, third, to produce draft animals for the cart and plow. To breed for milk and for draft might seem a self-canceling proposition. But such is the demand of the country, and the concern of Government is to get on with the job and strike the best possible compromise.
On the Government farms, foreign fodder crops, such as Egyptian clover, have also been introduced; much emphasis is laid on fodder developments; and the use of silage, economically stored in pits, is demonstrated. Men are sent out to deliver illustrated lectures and to install silage pits in the villages. And young pedigreed herd bulls, whether as loans, or as gifts, or to purchase, are offered to the people.
All the fine animals produced at Lucknow, Pusa, Bangalore and the other Government plants, are con-scientiously watched over by British breeders. In point of general competence, of cleanliness and order, and of simple practicality, the plants stand inspection. But all such matters are utterly foreign to the minds of the Indian peasant, and for those who might best and quickest teach the peasant--the Indian aristocrat, the Indian intelligentsia--rarely do peasant or cattle carry any appeal.
With the exception of certain princes of Indian states who have learned from England to take pride in their herds, and again with the exception of a mere handful of estate-holders scattered over the country, cattle-breeding is left entirely to a generally illiterate class known as gvalas, who lack enterprise, capital and intelligence to carry on the work.
I saw little, anywhere, to suggest a real appreciation of the importance of change and much of opposite import, such, for example, as the spectacle of a fine pedigreed herd bull, lent by Government for the improvement of the cattle of a village and returned a wreck from ill-usage. He was brought into a Government Veterinary Hospital during my visit in the place, and it needed no testimony other than one's eyes to see that he had been starved, cruelly beaten and crippled, while the wounds on one leg, obviously inflicted by blows, were so badly infected that healing seemed scarcely possible.
"What will you do?" I asked the British official in charge.
"Fine the head man of the village, probably. But it does little good. It is a human trait not to appreciate what one doesn't pay for. And they won't pay for bet • tering their cattle."
Further, to take at random another point, it is difficult to get intelligent selective breeding work out of a people who, for example, refuse to keep record of the milk-yield of a cow on the ground that to weigh or to measure the gift of God is impious. "We will not do it!" the milkers of the Punjab declare. "If we did, our children would die."
Meantime, aside from the selection of the worst, by starvation and by breeding from the worst through sacred runt bulls, a third force works to remove the best milch cows from a land whose supply of milk is already tragically short. Government, at Karnal, has amply demonstrated the feasibility of producing milk in the country and transporting it to the city in bulk, even as far as a thousand miles. And the Calcutta cooperative dairies have shown the possibilities of local service from suburb to town. But the Indian milk purveyor in general sees naught in that. His practice is to buy the best up-country young milch cows he can find, bring them to the city in calf, keep them during their current lactation, to prolong which he often removes their ovaries, and then to sell them to the butcher. This happens on the grand scale, kills off the best cows, and thereby constitutes a steady drain on the vital resources of the country.
The Indian holds that he cannot afford to maintain an animal in the city during her dry season, and he has no plan for keeping her elsewhere. Therefore he exterminates her after her lactation; most of the cost of her raising goes to waste, and her virtues die with her.[3]
[3. W. Smith, Imperial Dairy Expert, in Agricultural Journal of India, Vol. XVII, Part I, January, 1922.]
Government, all over India, have learned to prepare for trouble on the annual Muhammadan feast one of the features of which is the sacrificial killing of cows. Hindu feeling, at that period, rises to the danger pitch, and riots, bloodshed and destruction are always the likely outcome. For is not the embodied Sacrosanctity that lies at the root of Hinduism being done to der.cn by the infidel in the very arms of her adorers?
Given this preliminary reminder, nothing is more characteristic of the Indian mentality than the balancing facts pointed out in Mr. Gandhi's Young India of November 5, 1925:
We forget that a hundred times the number of cows killed for Kurbanl[4] by the Musalmans are killed for purposes of trade...The cows are almost all owned by Hindus, and the butchers would find their trade gone if the Hindus refused to sell the cows.
[4. The annual Muhammadan feast above mentioned.]
Four weeks after the publication of the leading article above quoted, Mr. Gandhi returns to the subject, citing what he describes as "illuminative extracts" from a report of the Indian Industrial Committee sitting in Bengal and the Central Provinces.[5] The hearing is on the commercial slaughter of cows for beef and hides. The investigating committee asks, concerning the attitude of the surrounding Hindu populace toward the industry:
[5. Young India, Nov. 26, 1925, p. 416.]
Have these slaughterhouses aroused any local feeling in the matter?
The witness replies:
They have aroused local feelings of greed and not of indig-nation. I think you will find that many of the municipal members are shareholders in these yards. Brahmans and Hindus are also found to be shareholders.
"If there is any such thing as a moral government in the universe, we must answer for it some day," Mr. Gandhi's commentor helplessly laments.
This example of the selling of the cow by the Hindu for slaughter--he who will rise in murdering riot if a Muhammadan, possibly not too averse to the result, kills a cow outside a Hindu temple door--opens a topic that should perhaps be examined for other than its face value.
We of the West are continually in danger of misunderstanding the Indian through supposing that the mental picture produced by a given word or idea is the same in weight and significance to him and to us. His facility in English helps us to this error. We assume that his thought is like his tongue. He says, for example, that he venerates all life and is filled with tenderness for all animals. Lecturing in America, he speaks of the Hindu's sensitive refinement in this direction and of his shrinking from our gross unspirituality, our incomprehension of the sacred unity of the vital spark.
But if you suppose, from these seemingly plain words, that the average Hindu in India shows what we would call common humaneness toward animal life, you go far astray.
To the highly intelligent Brahman foreman of the Goverment farm at Bangalore, I one day said: "I regret that all over India you torture most bullocks and some cows by the disjointing of their tails. Look at the draft bullocks in that cart over there. Every vertebra in their tails is dislocated. As you are aware, it causes exquisite pain. Often the tail is broken short off."
"Ah, yes," replied the young Brahman, indifferently, "it is perfectly true that we do it. But that, you see, is necessary. The animals would not travel fast enough unless their tail-nerves are wrenched."
You may stand for hours on the busy Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, watching the bullock carts pass, without discovering a dozen animals whose tails are not a zig-zag string of breaks. It is easier, you see, for the driver to walk with the animal's tail in his hand, twisting its joints from time to time, than it is to beat the creature with his stick. If you ride in the bullock cart, however, with the driver riding before you, you will discover that, from this position, he has another way of speeding the gait. With his stick or his long hard toe-nails he periodically prods his animals' genital glands.
And only the alien in the land will protest.
It is one of the puzzles of India that a man whose bullock is his best asset will deliberately overload his animal, and then, half starved as it is, will drive it till it drops dead. The steep hillsides of Madras are a. Calvary of draft bullocks. One sees them, branded from head to tail, almost raw from brands and blows, forced up-hill until they fall and die. If a British official sees this or any other deed of cruelty, he acts. But the British are few in the land. Yet far fewer are the Indians whose sensibilities are touched by the sufferings of dumb beasts, or whose wrath is aroused by pain and abuse inflicted upon defenseless creatures.
The practice of phúká is common in most parts of India. Its object is to increase and prolong the milk production of cows. It is committed in several ways, but usually consists in thrusting a stick on which is bound a bundle of rough straw into the vagina of the cow and twisting it about, to produce irritation. The thing gives intense pain to the cow, and also produces sterility--• a matter of indifference to the dairyman, since he will in any case sell her for slaughter when she dries. Mr. Gandhi cites authority[6] that out of ten thousand cows in Calcutta dairy sheds, five thousand are daily subjected to this process.
[6. Young India, May 6, 1926, pp. 166-7.]
Mr. Gandhi quotes another authority on the manufacture of a dye esteemed by Indians and known as peuri:[7]
[7. Ibid., p. 167.]
By feeding the cow only on mango leaves, with no other form of feed nor even water to drink, the animal passes in the form of urine a dye which is sold at high rates in the bazaar. The animal so treated does not last long and dies in agony.
The young milch cow is usually carrying her calf when she is brought to the city. The Hindu dairyman does not want the calf, and his religion forbids him to kill it. So he finds other means to avoid both sin and the costs of keeping. In some sections of the country he will allow it a daily quarter- to half-cup of its mother's milk, because of a religious teaching that he who keeps the calf from the cow will himself suffer in the next life. But the allowance that saves the owner's soul is too small to save the calf who staggers about after its mother on the door-to-door milk route as long as its trembling legs will carry it. When the end comes, the owner skins the little creature, sews the skin together, stuffs it crudely with straw, shoves four sticks up the legs, and, when he goes forth on the morrow driving his cow, carries his handiwork over his shoulder. Then, when he stops at a customer's door to milk, he will plant before the mother the thing that was her calf, to induce her to milk more freely. Or again, in large plants, the new-born calves may be simply tossed upon the morning garbage carts, at the dairy door, and carried away to the dumps where they breathe their last among other broken rubbish.
The water buffalo--the carabao of the Philippines--is in India an immensely useful creature. The best of the Delhi blood give yearly from six to ten thousand pounds of milk carrying from 7.5 to 9 per cent, butter-fat. The buffalo bull makes a powerful draft animal for cart and plow. But the species is large, and expensive to raise. Therefore it is usual for milk dealers to starve their buffalo calves outright. Young India[8] quotes testimonies showing various phases of this practice. One of these draws attention to
[8. May 6, 1926, p. 167.]
...the number of buffalo calves...being abandoned to die of starvation in public streets, and often when they fall down through sheer exhaustion, being mutilated by trams, motor-cars and carriages. These animals are generally driven out from, the cattle stables at night...simply to save all the milk the mother has, for sale.
Otherwise, the calf is tied to a stake anywhere about the place and left without food or water till it dies.
The water buffalo, having no sweat-glands, suffers severely in the hot sun and should never be compelled to endure it unprotected. Therefore, says another of Young India's authorities, "one finds that [the starving buffalo calves] are usually tied in the sunniest part of the yard. The dairymen appear systematically to use these methods to kill off the young stock."
And then, turning from city dairymen to country owners and country regions, Mr. Gandhi gives us this picture:[9]
[9. Young India, May 6, 1926, p. 167.]
In Gujarat [northern Bombay Presidency], the he-calf is simply starved off by withholding milk from him. In other parts he is driven away to the forests to become the prey of wild beasts. In Bengal he is often tied up in the forest and left without food, either to starve or be devoured. And yet the people who do this are those who would not allow an animal to be killed outright even if it were in extreme suffering!
In this, one is reminded of the fate of the villagers' cows, which, when they are too diseased or too old to give further service, are turned out of the village, to stand and starve till they are too weak to defend themselves with heel or horn and then are pulled down and devoured by the starving village dogs.
Surely no Westerner, even the most meteoric tourist, has passed through India without observing those dogs. They haunt every railway platform, skulking along under the car windows. Bad dreams out of purgatory they look, all bones and sores and grisly hollows, their great, undoglike eyes full of terror and furtive cunning, of misery and of hatred. All over the land they exist in hosts, forever multiplying. In the towns they dispute with the cows and goats for a scavenger's living among the stalls and gutters of the bazaars. Devoured with disease and vermin, they often go mad from bites received from mad jackals of the packs that roam even city parts by night.
And, according to the Hindu creed, nothing can be done for them. Their breeding may not be stopped, their number may not be reduced, and since a dog's touch defiles, their wounds and sores and broken bones may not be attended.
In this connection an interesting discussion has recently developed in the pages of Young India.[10] Ths incident that gave it birth was the destruction of sixty mad dogs, collected on the premises of an Ahmedabad mill-owner. The mill-owner himself, though a Hindu, had ordered their killing. This act aroused much ill feeling in the town, and the Hindu Humanitarian League referred the question to Mr. Gandhi, as a religious authority, asking:
[10. October and November, 1926. The issue of November il, 1926, gives the following figures for cases of hydrophobia treated in the Civil Hospital of the town of Ahmedabad: Jan. to Dec., 1925, 1117; Jan. to Sept., 1926, 990.]
When Hinduism forbids the taking of the life of any living being,...do you think it right to kill rabid dogs?...Are not the man who actually destroys the dogs, as also the man at whose instance he does so, both sinners?...The Ahmedabad Municipality...is soon going to have before it a resolution for the castration of stray dogs. Does religion sanction the castration of an animal?
Mr. Gandhi's reply is full of light on Hindu thinking:
There can be no two opinions on the fact that Hinduism regards killing a living being as sinful...Hinduism has laid down that killing for sacrifice is no himsa [violence]. This is only a half-truth...But what is inevitable is not regarded as a sin, so much so that the science of daily practice has not only declared the inevitable violence involved in killing for sacrifice as permissible but even regarded it as meritorious...[But the man] who is responsible for the protection of lives under his care and who does not possess the virtues of the recluse [to heal by spirit], but is capable of destroying a rabid dog, is faced with a conflict of duties. If he kills the dog he commits a sin. If he does not kill it, he commits a graver sin. So he prefers to commit the lesser one...It is therefore a thousand pities that the question of stray dogs, etc., assumes such a monstrous proportion in this sacred land of ahimsa [non-violence]. It may be a sin to destroy rabid dogs and such others as are liable to catch rabies. ...It is a sin, it should be a sin, to feed stray dogs.
In the land of ahimsa, the rarest of sins is that of allowing a crumb of food to a starving dog, or, equally, of putting him out of his misery. Mr. Gandhi's approval of the latter step, even as to animals gone mad, has brought down upon him such an avalanche of Hindu protest that he sighs aloud under its burden upon his time.
And since the only remaining resource, castration, lies under religious ban because it interrupts the ordained stages of life, the miseries of the dog, like many another misery of India, revolves in a circle.