Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Tourists on their way through Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and other Indian cities are astonished at the
liberties enjoyed by stray cattle. The animals wander through the streets, browse off the stalls, defecate all over the
sidewalks and snarl traffic by pausing to chew their cuds in the middle of a busy intersection. In the countryside,
the cattle congregate on the shoulders of every highway and spend much of their time taking leisurely walks down
the railway tracks … What are those animals doing in the markets, on the lawns, along the highways and the rail-
way tracks and up on the barren hillsides? What are they doing if not eating every morsel of grass, stubble and
garbage that cannot be consumed by human beings and converting it into milk and other useful products?
These miscreant cows are tolerated (as the cliché we use to describe something immune
from criticism reminds us) because they are sacred. Harris explains the economic forces
and the class politics that lie behind the reverence accorded to the cow in India, which al-
lows her not only to mop up waste but also to act in a Robin Hood capacity (rather like the
Tswana's locusts mentioned previously):
One reason why cow love is so often misunderstood is that it has different implic-
ations for the rich and the poor. Poor farmers use it as a license to scavenge, while
wealthy farmers resist it as a rip-off. To the poor farmer, the cow is a holy beggar;
to the rich it is a thief. Occasionally the cows invade someone's pastures or planted
fields. The landlords complain, but the poor peasants plead ignorance and depend on
cow love to get their animals back. If there is competition, it is between man and man
or caste and caste, not between man and beast.
The Hindu taboo against harming cows contributes to the adaptive resilience of
the human population 'by protecting cattle that fatten in the public domain or at the
landlord's expense'. The tolerance accorded to them allows large numbers of cattle to
graze in a highly populated country where only 3.9 per cent of the land is pasture. The
grass itself has evolved to accommodate them: Allan Savory observes that, in contrast
to the western United States, 'in the densely populated brittle environments of India,
where there are millions of animals, particularly sacred cows, grasses that can with-
that 'probably less than 20 per cent of what the cattle eat consists of humanly edible
substances: most of this is fed to working oxen and water buffalo.'
From this virtually free resource, the poor and landless of India obtain four benefits from
the cow: milk, manure, muscle-power and meat. The amount of milk produced by these
hardy Zebus is pitiful by industrial standards, but it is protein for the poor and the feed is
free. The cow's manure piles up for her owner when she is stalled, and is bonus biomass
to the cowless when she is grazing. As soon as a pat hits the street, a child rushes out and
sweeps up the little gift as if it were manna from heaven. The dung is also used as fuel,
