A week of carnage - mass murder of animals

Published on Friday, 27 November 2009

This is the week of carnage. Apparently, God, gods and goddesses have given the sign – they demand blood. Man's inhumanity attains a crescendo when he sacrifices innocent animals on the altar. During this week, Nepal's ground will be soaked with blood from decapitated heads of thousands and thousands of buffalos. This is all to satisfy the whims of goddess Gadhimai. Do people really believe she would deliver the goods?

Men cannot kill their fellow men with impunity, so they satisfy their bloodlust with large kukri knives to chop down young calves. Despite protests from many quarters, Nepalese Government had given their blessings to this unimaginable horror that would extinguish about a quarter of a million animal lives.

This repeats every five years. And this repeats, every year, to a lesser degree, during the worship of Kali.

This is the week of carnage. Millions of animals will be killed because Ibrahim thought God was telling him to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion. The son was spared, but a sheep was sacrificed setting a way for slaughter of countless number of animals for forever.

Man might need to eat meat, but mass murder of helpless animals using brutal methods cannot be considered self-sacrifice. These monstrous tribal rituals have made their way into the twenty-first century. They make our heart heavy, because we know that a simple sacrifice performed by an easy blow of a kukri knife, on a coconut or an orange, can be a gentle and noble representation of self-sacrifice. If men were to be the custodian of this earth, they need to be the gentle custodian, they need to be responsible for all living and non-living.