Column

Only the most pathetic excuses for human beings can find a barbaric pastime like cockfighting pleasurable. The same can be said for those who promote and partake in dog fights or bull baiting. And to call it tradition is not so much whitewashing the truth as it is packing it up in a rocket and blasting it off to Uranus.

Tradition is merely a veil to hide customs like sati, child marriage, and other quintessentially human debacles. Tradition be damned.
Across India, animals are sold like lumpen pieces of living meat at markets that defy every thread of decency that we claim to be the sole purview of our species. From puppies and kittens, to astoundingly intelligent parrots and monkeys, animals incapable of defending themselves are sold to people who will either mistreat them out of sheer malice, or are too ignorant to know better.

Animal welfare organisations are underfunded and woefully ill-equipped to combat the menace of animal-trafficking and cruelty. They get little to no support from law enforcement agencies, and our politicians couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone pass legislation on this matter.

From Mumbai to Bangalore animal bazaars flourish right under the noses of so-called animal rights activists who seem more interested in column space in newspapers and sound bytes on TV rather than doing what they profess to be their life’s aim: saving animals. The media itself can only do so much. Our job is education, information and investigation. Bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to book is the job of the police and municipal offices, who must be harangued by activists and the media into doing their job.

One does empathise, however, with their argument that they simply do not have enough boots on the ground to protect people and animals. So the onus must lie on the people themselves. We need to be educated enough to understand that by protecting animals we rise above the petty and selfish rapids that rage in our society.

Indians claim to be an animal-loving people, we’re not. Feeding the stray dog on your street does not prove love, it proves pity. Love would be making sure it was neutered, had all its vaccinations, put on a proper diet and not allowed to become obese, and taken into the home to become a member of the family, rather than a plaything for the bored. That’s love, everything else is tomfoolery.

Jeremy Bentham wrote in his 1823 treatise, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse?

But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. The question is not can they reason? nor can they talk? but can they suffer?

Oh yes, animals can suffer. And far too often the soft eyes of a puppy reflect our cruelty. Animal cruelty is a dastardly felony; knowing about it and failing to stop it is more than that…it is a crime of humanity.