India’s Sacred Cow Essay

The cultural practices of other people often seem strange, irrational, and even inexplicable to outsiders. In fact, the members of the culture in question may be unable to give a ration exclusivelyy satisfying explanation of why they be pitch as they do they may say that the gods wish it so, or that it is always done that way. Yet a fundamental assumption of social science is that no matter how peculiar or even bizarre human cultures may appear, they can be understood at least in part. To Americans and Europeans, the attitude of most people in India toward all overawes is perplexing. Hindus regard the animals as unspeakable and will non kill or have them. In India a grand population of browbeats wanders freely through both rural beas and urban center streets, undisturbed by the millions of hungry and malnourished people. Why? Marvin Harris suggests an answer to such puzzles. In this quite famous article, he suggests that Indias sacred overawe is in fact quite a rational c ultural adaptation because the cow is so extraordinarily useful.News photographs that came out of India during the famine of the late 1960s showed starving people stretching out bony hands to beg for food for thought while cows strolled behind them undisturbed. The Hindu, it seems, would rather starve to death than eat his cow or even deprive it of food. western specialists in food habits around the world consider Hinduism an irrational ideology that compels people to overlook abundant, nutritious foods for scarcer, less(prenominal) healthful foods.Many Western ob practicers believe that an absurd devotion to the mother cow pervades Indian life. Many Indians agree with Western assessments of the Hindu reverence for their cattle, the zebu, a large-humped species of cattle prevalent in Asia and Africa. M. N. Srinivas, an Indian anthropologist states Orthodox Hindu opinion regards the killing of cattle with abhorrence, even though the refusal to kill the vast number of trivial c attle which exists in India today is detrimental to the nation. Even the Indian Ministry of Information formerly maintained that the large animal population is more than a indebtedness than an asset in view of our demesne resources. Accounts from many different sources point to the same conclusion India, one of the worlds great civilizations, is being stifled by its love for the cow.The easy explanation for Indias devotion to the cow, the one most Westerners and Indians would offer, is that cow worship is an integral part of Hinduism. Religion is somehow grievous for the soul, even if it sometimes fails the body. Religion orders the cosmos and explains our place in the universe. Religious beliefs, many would claim, have existed for thousands of years and have a life of their own. They are not understandable in scientific terms. But all this ignores history. There is more to be said for cow worship than is immediately apparent.History of Cow idolize The earliest Vedas, the Hindu sacred texts from the Second Millennium B.C., do not prohibit the butchering of cattle. Instead, they ordain it as a part of sacrificial services. The primeval Hindus did not avoid the flesh of overawe and bulls they ate it at ceremonial feasts presided over by Brahman priests. Cow 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 religious texts written during the last 3,000 years of Indian history. The Vedas from the First Millennium B.C. contain contradictory passages, some referring to ritual slaughter and others to a strict taboo on boeuf 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 feed on it. Religious feasts involving the ritual slau ghter and consumption of livestock were eliminated and meat mother in was restricted to the nobility. By 1000 A.D., all Hindus were forbidden to eat beef. Ahimsa, the Hindu belief in the unity of all life, was the spiritual justification for this restriction. But it is difficult to ascertain exactly when this change occurred. An important event that helped to cast the modern complex was the Islamic invasion, which took place in the Eighth 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 much 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 fields. The cow is a symbol of health and abundance.The Economic Uses of The Cow The cattle are not just worshi ped and revered in India. They are also extraordinarily useful. The zebu cow supports the draw 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 cows provide less than half the take out produced in India. Most cows in India are not dairy breeds. In most regions, when an Indian farmer wants a steady, uplifted-quality source of milk he usually invests in a female pissing buffalo. In India the water buffalo is the specialized dairy breed because its milk has a prouder butterfat content than zebu milk. Although the farmer milks his zebu cows, the milk is merely a by-product. More vital than zebu milk to South Asian farmers are zebu calves. Male calves are especially look upond because from bulls come oxen which are the mainstay of the Indian agrarian system.Small, fast oxen drag wooden plows through late-spring fields when monsoons have dampened the dry, cra cked earth. After harvest, the oxen break the grain from the stalk by stomping through mounds of cut wheat and sift. For rice cultivation in irrigated fields, the male water buffalo is preferred (it pulls better 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 draft animals instead of cows are counted, India appears to have too few domestic ruminants, not too many. Since each of the 70 million farms in India requires a draft team, it follows that Indian peasants should use 140 million animals in the fields. But in that respect are nevertheless 83 million oxen and male water buffalo on the subcontinent, a shortage of 30 million draft teams.In other regions of the world, joint ownership of draft animals might overcome a shortage, but In dian agriculture is closely tied to the monsoon rains of late spring and summer. matter 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 using theirs. Any delay in biteing the soil drastically lowers production. Because of this dependence on draft animals, loss of the family oxen is devastating. If a fauna dies, the farmer must borrow money to buy or rent an ox at interest rates so high that he ultimately loses his land. Every year foreclosures force thousands of poverty-stricken peasants to abandon the countryside for the overcrowded cities.If a family is fortunate enough to own a fertile cow, it will be able to rear renewments 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 sur vives, it has no way to farm the land, no oxen to work the land, and no cows to produce oxen. The prohibition 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 well. Religious laws that forbid the slaughter of cattle promote the recovery of the agricultural system from the dry Indian winter and from periods of drought. The monsoon, on which all agriculture depends, is erratic. Sometimes 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 little or no food and water.Like camels, they store both in their humps and recuperate quickly with only a little nourishment. During droughts the cows often stop lactating and bec ome destitute. 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, religious laws against cow slaughter assure the recovery of the agricultural system from the greatest 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. One police station in Madras collects strays and pastures them in a field adjacent to the station. After a keen fine is paid, a cow is returned to its rightful owner when the owner thinks the cow shows signs of being able to reproduce.During the hot, dry spring months most of India is like a desert. Indian farmers often complain they cannot feed their livestock duri ng this period. They maintain cattle by letting them scavenge on the sparse potbelly along the roads. In the cities cattle are encouraged to scavenge near food stalls to supplement their scant diet. These are the wandering cattle tourists report seeing throughout India. Westerners call for shopkeepers to respond 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) baffled in India How we bleed her to take the last drop of milk from her. How we starve her to emaciation, how we ill-treat the calves, 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.Oxen generally receive better treatment than cows. When food is in short tot, thrifty Indian peasants feed their working bullocks and ignore their cows, but rarely 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 prohibition 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 their animals. Fewer healthy, well-nourished 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 analyse of livestock production in the linked States, one scientist at Cornell University found that 91 percent of the cereal, legume, and vegetable protein suitable for human consumption is consumed by livestock. Approximately three quarters 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 fuel 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 sugar 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 weeds on the roadsides. The food for zebu cattle costs the human population virtually nothing. Basically the cattle con vert 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 tons 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 another 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 use as fuel for cooking the rest is returned to the fields as fertilizer.Dried dung burns slowly, cleanly, and with low heat characteristics that satisfy the crime syndicate 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 used for cooking fuel provides the energy-equivalent of 43 million tons of coal. At current 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 commercial fertilizers, the expense would be even greater. Roger Revelle of the University of California 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.Even if foreign loans were to provide the money, the capital outlay necessary to replace the Indian cow with tractors and fertilizers for the fields, coal for the fires, and transportation for the family would probably warp international financial institutions for years. Instead of asking the I ndians to learn from the American model of industrial agriculture, American farmers might learn energy conservation 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 percentage 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. ground 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 broken down by anaerobic bacteria, methane gas and carbon dioxide are produced. After the methane is cleansed of the carbon dioxide, it is operational 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 exchangeable to this one could make cattle ranches almost independent of utility and gasoline companies, for methane can be used to run 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 industry are now striving for. Studies often background the efficiency of the Indian cow, because dead cows are used for purposes that Hindus prefer not to acknowledge.When a cow dies, an Untouchable, a member of one of the lowest rank castes in India, is summoned to haul away the carcass. Higher castes consider the body of the dead cow polluting i f 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, contrary to the teachings of Hinduism, impregnable 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 distribute 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 who 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 s ell beef to retail customers and to the restaurants that serve steak.6