The Future Veal

This morning I was greeted by a friend’s FB post. It contained a reporting from India: “Biker dies after hitting a stray cow. Cops booked him instead of its owner.”

Confusing headline. Booked “him”? Him, who? The dead biker – because it was his fault as he had hit the holy cow? Or the cow – for being responsible for the biker’s death? Him? Its? Should it be his owner or its owner then?

This news can be interpreted in both ways. Cops booked the dead man, and not the cow’s owner (or) the cops booked the cow and not its owner. In both instances, it’s going to be stupid. Ideally, no one should be booked, as one is an animal and the other a dead person, but in this instance, the owner should be booked, because in India, owners of cows deliberately let their cattle loose in order to extract compensation from the drivers should their vehicles collide with their animal.

Reading the news, I was reminded of my earlier blog post about Cowistan. This is exactly what I had addressed in that post.

We cannot blame the cows at any point. Never. They do what they know best. Chew their cud all day long. They have no malice in their nature. To think of it, no animal in the wild has any malice. What they do, they do instinctively. It’s the Man that’s the worst animal on earth. Malicious, dangerous and frightening.

This is why other animals have fear in their eyes when approached by a human they don’t recognise. They are afraid of us more than we should be of them because we will kill them just for our taste, but they will only attack out of defence.

I met this little calf on one of my recent walks in the park. First, it was so frightened that it leapt haphazardly away from me, giving a slapdash performance, but then it slowly came near me, its head lowered enough for me to pat it. It was such a delightful sight as it placed its entire trust in me.

My thought at that point – this infant will soon make its way to the market. One of my kind will hang, draw and quarter it to serve another one of us.

It should not trust me. It should not trust any of us. We are animals.

The memory of stray cows often takes my mind to a funny remark an American friend once made after seeing a photo of a cow on the streets of Rajasthan I’d shared with him. According to him, the only cow they get to see was the one inside the hamburger. He didn’t say it in a uncaring way, because he’s not that sort of a person, but the remark kind of connects my above two accounts, the stray cow and the calf reared for the purpose of its meat.

Unlike my American friend whose comment was said as a joke, my other friend, an Anglo-Iranian-Indian, who I recently met, said that he and his family were “hardcore” meat eaters. Not sure why he used the word “hardcore”. Did he mean they eat more meat than an average meat eater, or they eat only meat at every dinner, or they keep trying different animals, or they go for the kill themselves and eat like animals, uncut and uncooked?

Does that mean that I’m a “hardcore” vegetarian? Because I do all of the above but to greens. Like that cow in my photo.

Sapna Dhandh Sharma