On National Animal Rights Day, volunteers gathered to demonstrate for the rights of animals at Juhu Chowpatty on Sunday evening
For the very first time in India, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Dharamsala, participated in a co-ordinated memorial-styled demonstration along with 20 other cities across the globe on the June 4 which is celebrated as the National Animal Rights Day (NARD) in the US.
Held at Juhu Chowpatty, it was a heart-warming evening for Mumbai. Volunteers from the Mumbai Animal Liberation League, an activist group held up placards with pictures of animals, along with tombstones in memory of the animals who were abused, or were victims of the fashion and food industry. With curious onlookers at the beach, the evening commenced with scripts and poems written by the volunteers, read out in all three languages, English, Hindi, and Marathi, and concluded with the reading of the Declaration of Animal Rights.
NARD was established in the year 2011, by “Our Planet. Theirs Too,” a non-for-profit organization in the US. Today it is observed annually in multiple countries on the first Sunday of June, the sole purpose being, to raise awareness for the rights of animals. “As a volunteer based activist group in Mumbai, we conduct awareness activities for the rights of animals regularly. But three months back we decided to take a step further and wrote to ‘Our Planet. Theirs Too.’ Rather than simply focusing on the abuse of strays, we want to shift focus to animals killed for food, or mulched in the poultry, food and fashion sector,” explains Cecil Thounaojam, an organizing member of the demonstration. While the event in a way propagated the vegan way of life, most of the volunteers shared the same sentiments. Brinda Poojari, currently at 29-years, made the transition from a non-vegetarian to a vegetarian two years back. “There are so many alternatives to consuming dairy products. Man does not really need cow’s milk. There are almond and soy milk, which one can use instead. Similarly goats, chickens, and hens do not have rights of their own and are killed for food, which is wrong. Cows are often pumped up with hormones just so that they produce more milk, reducing them to mere milk-machines. Strays like dogs and cats are not abused on a large scale because they are considered as companions, while the others are just looked at as food.”
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