"This country is the crudest in the world, to animals," said an old veterinarian, long practicing in India. It would perhaps be fairer to repeat that the people of India follow their religions, which, save with the small sect called Jains, produce no mercy either to man or to beast, in the sense that we of the West know mercy.
Mr. Gandhi himself writes:[1]
[1. Young India, Feb. 26, 1925.]
In a country where the cow is an object of worship there should be no cattle problems at all. But our cow-worship has resolved itself into an ignorant fanaticism. The fact that we have more cattle than we can support is a matter for urgent treatment, I have already suggested the taking over of the question by cow protection societies.
Cow Protection Societies maintain gaushalas, or cow asylums. These asylums, like the pinjrapoles, or asylums for all animals, are maintained by gifts, and have access, through rich Hindu merchants, to almost unlimited funds. "Let Government of India promise to stop the killing of cows in India and they can have all the money they can use--plus a war with the Muhammadan," an experienced old Hindu official once told me.
A strong claim to the bounty of the gods is believed to be established through saving the life of a cow. Yet as a Hindu, you are not disturbed in conscience by selling your good cow to a butcher, because it is he, not you, who will kill the cow. Then, taking the money he gives you, you may buy of him, for a fraction of that sum, the worst cow in his shambles, turn her over to the gaushala to care for, and thereby acquire religious merit, profiting your soul and your purse in one transaction.
Having personally visited a number of gaushalas and pinjrapoles, I cannot but wonder whether those who support them so lavishly, those who commit animals to their care, and those who, like Mr. Gandhi, so strongly advocate their maintenance and increase, ever look inside their gates. I first heard of them through a western animal lover long domiciled in India. He said:
"The Hindu who, as an act of piety, buys a cow of the butcher and places her in the gaushala, always buys a poor diseased animal because he gets her cheap. When he places her in the gaushala he does not give money with her, or, at best, not money enough for her decent keep. And even if he did, the keeper would pocket most of it. The suffering in these places is terrible. In one of them I recently saw an old cow lying helpless, being consumed by maggots which had begun at her hind quarters. It would take them ten days to eat up to her heart and kill her. Till then she must lie as she lay.
"'Can't you do something for her?' I asked the keeper.
"'Why?' he replied, honestly enough. 'Why should I? What for?"'
My second informant was an American cattle specialist living in India, a highly-qualified practical man. He said:
"I was asked to visit some of these gaushalas and give advice. And because the political unrest since the War has inclined many of these people to shut their minds to the council of British officials, I hoped that, as an American and an outsider, I could be of use. But I found in every place that I visited either intentional dishonesty or gross mismanagement. In all cases the animals imprisoned there were the least of anybody's concern. My advice was not welcome. When they found I would not give them a rubber-stamp approval, they had no use for me at all."
I next consulted a notable religious leader, the Guru[2] of Dial Bagh. His words were:
[2. Religious master.]
"I have visited two of these places, both times taking them by surprise. The sights that I saw there were so horrible that for two days afterward I could not take food."
Finally, I recorded the testimony of an Indian trained in the western school of cattle-breeding and dairying and now occupying a position of considerable responsibility in that line. Describing the pinjrapole as "a lane or square full of animal's pens," he went on?
"Religious sentiment puts the creatures there, but there it stops. They are much neglected and suffer torments through neglect. Rich merchants and bankers subscribe annually tons of money for their care, but the money all goes to graft and waste. The creatures in most of the asylums are far worse off than they were when they scavenged in the gutters for a living, with a happy chance of getting killed by passing cars. They are miserable, dying skeletons. The caretakers have no knowledge of the care of animals and no previous training or experience. The money spent in such big sums is not spent on them! There are good animal asylums in India, but they are few!"
The first gaushala that I saw for myself was in the suburbs of a central Indian city. Over the entrance gate was a charming painting of the blue god Krishna in the forest, piping to white cows.
Inside the high walls at a distance lay a large pleasant garden of fruit-trees and vegetable beds encircling a pleasant bungalow--the keeper's house. On the hither side of the garden was the place of the cows. This was a treeless, shrubless, shelterless yard of hard-trodden, cracked, bare clay, which, in the rains, would be a wallow of foul mud, inhabited by animals whose bones, in some cases, were literally cutting through their skins. Some lay gasping, too weak to stand. Some had great open sores at which the birds, perched on their hipbones or their staring ribs, picked and tore. Some had broken legs that dangled and flopped as they stirred. Many were diseased. All were obviously starved.
Bulls as wretched as the cows stood among them, and in a little pen at the side were packed some 250 small calves. From these last arose a pitiful outcry, at the sound of approaching steps; and as I looked down over the pen-wall at their great brown eyes, their hollow sides and their shaking legs, it occurred to me to ask what they were fed. The answer, frankly given by the gaushala attendant, was that each calf gets the equivalent of one small tea-cupful of milk a day, until it dies--which as a rule, and happily, it shortly does--the rest of the milk being sold in the bazaar by the keeper of the gaushala.
Asking next to see the daily ration of a cow, I was shown the granary--a bin measuring perhaps five by three by two feet, containing small seeds heavily mixed with husks. Of this each full-grown animal got one half-pound daily. Nothing else whatever was fed, excepting a little dry chopped straw. Straw contains no food values, but would serve for a time to keep the creatures' two sides from touching. No paddock was provided, and no grazing of any sort. The animals merely stood or lay as I saw them until the relief of death.
One cow had but three legs, the hind leg having been amputated below the knee, "because she kicked when they milked her."
In other gaushalas I saw cripples who had been made so in the process of creating monsters. For this purpose they cut a leg from one calf and graft it anywhere on the body of another, to exhibit the result for money as a natural portent. The maimed calf, if it does not bleed or starve or rot to death, may be bought for a song and sent to a gaushala. No dissatisfaction seemed to be felt as to this history.
In the heart of the city of Ahmedabad, within a few miles of Mr. Gandhi's pleasant and comfortable home in which he writes his earnest pleas for the support of cow shelters and pinjrapoles, I visited a large pinjra-pole whose description, after what has already been said, need not be inflicted upon the reader's sensibilities. I hope that every animal that I saw in it is safely dead.
But from such memories it is a pleasure to turn to the one exception that my personal experience revealed, an establishment maintained by "The Association for Saving Milch Cattle from Going to the Bombay Slaughter House."
This society is composed practically entirely of rich Indian merchants and merchants' associations. Its latest report[3] affords some interesting reading. It begins with a statement incorporating the estimate that, during the five years from April 1, 1919, to March 31, 1924, 229,257 cows were slaughtered in Bombay City, and that 97,583 calves and young buffaloes were "tortured to death in the stables."
[3. An Appeal by Shree Ghatkopar Sarvajanika Jivadaya Khata, 75 Mahabir Building, Bombay.]
The report proceeds with an appeal against all slaughter, even of bullocks, sheep and goats, for which the figures are also given. Then it concerns itself with the question of the shortage of milk:
We Hindus claim to protect the cow. If this claim were just, India should be a land flowing with milk. But as a matter of fact this is not the case. Milk in cow-protecting Bombay, for instance, is nearly as dear as in cow-killing London or New York. Good milk cannot be had for love or money and the direct consequence of this state of things is a really terrible mortality among infants and a heavy death rate among adults...
The "dairy" plant that the Association itself maintains in the country on the outskirts of Bombay consists of a decent set of cowsheds, substantially and practically built for shelter, air and sanitation, and reasonably clean. The superintendent said he was feeding fifteen pounds of hay, with eight pounds of grain and oil cake, per head, daily. And the cattle, such as they were, did not look hungry. The herd consisted of 277 head, whose aggregate milking came to about 130 quarts a day, which, sold to some 130 families, gave a daily income of about $22.50 to the establishment. Fresh cows were sold out of the plant on condition that the purchaser should never sell them to be killed.
The staff, entirely Indian, impressed me as being eager and interested as to their work. Said the chief:
"If this place were merely commercial there would not be so many non-commercial cattle here. We have to buy out of the slaughter house; but where once we bought the poorest and cheapest, now we have learned to buy the best. And besides, the idea of any sort of commercial element, in a gaushala, is new to India. Up to the present we have not put any private milkmen out of business, or appreciably reduced the city's slaughter. But we hope to do so, in the long run. On my staff here I have two or three Bachelors of Agriculture--young men trained on the Government Breeding and Dairy farms to understand cattle. And that you will never find in any other gaushala or pinjrapole in all India. We, here, believe in scientific care."
Looked at from the point of view of an American farmer, the whole thing was too primitive to discuss. Looked at from the Indian background, it was a shining light, and one felt almost guilty in noticing that all the staff were cousins, nephews, or close relatives of the superintendent.
But, it was a British-trained Indian in Government employ under the direction of a British chief, who rescued this gaushala. from a bad start, devised the present advanced scheme and pursuaded the Association to adopt it.
Meantime, the Indian politicians, at home and abroad, curse "the criminal negligence of the Government," [4] beat the air with words, spurn agriculture and the agriculturalist, and, when publicity dictates, send small contributions to the other kind of gaushala.
[4. Young India, May 13, 1926, p. 174.]