Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
dia's millennium-long doctrinal dispute over meat-eating and animal sacrifices is perhaps
the best documented example we have of a civilization imposing cultural taboos to conform
with ecological restraints. It shows it can be done, and our own civilization, faced with the
need to reduce meat consumption, has a great deal to learn from it.
But in other respects the system is manifestly unjust. The caste system preceded cow
worship, but the slaughter ban, if Ambedkar is to be believed, precipitated untouchability.
Moreover the protection afforded to Indian cows has long been criticized on animal welfare
grounds by foreign observers, who viewed that the way many of the animals were treated,
they would be better off dead. To an extent this may be due to a misplaced comparison
of the hardy Zebu with the Hereford and Holstein that live off Britain's fat pastures. But
Gandhi was in agreement: 'I do not know that the condition of the cattle in any part of the
world is so bad as in unhappy India'. He 'remembered the magnificent specimen of the
cattle in England where, while they certainly did eat beef, they bestowed the greatest care
on their cattle wealth'.
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As the 20th century progresses, these animal welfare criticisms start to get picked up by
the writers of economic reports. A 1959 Ford Foundation study concluded that about half
of Indian cows could be regarded as surplus in relation to feed supply. Alan Heston, an
economist from the University of Pennsylvania, reported in 1971 that India had 30 milli-
on unproductive cows, producing a tenth the amount of milk that US or European cows
produced, which he argued were redundant, and ought to be slaughtered. 'Slaughter' said
Mahatma Gandhi, 'is a thing that suggests itself easily to Western economists. That is why
they cut the Gordian knot, by slaughtering the inferior breed of cows and bulls.'
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Marvin Harris sets out to show that the economists are missing the point:
Many experts assume that man and cow are locked in a deadly competition for
land and food crops. This might be true if Indian farmers followed the American ag-
ribusiness model and fed their animals on food crops … In his study of cattle in West
Bengal, Dr Odend'hal discovered that the major constituent in the cattle's diet is in-
edible byproducts of human food crops, principally rice straw, wheat bran and rice
husks. When the Ford Foundation estimated that half of the cattle were surplus in re-
lation to feed supply, they meant to say that half of the cattle manage to survive, even
without access to fodder crops.'
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Moreover, to concentrate on their milk yield is to misunderstand the default role of the
cow in the Indian economy. You don't expect much milk from an animal that lives on straw,
hedgerow and city detritus - though the little that it does produce plays an important role
in meeting the nutritional needs of the very poor. But the Zebu doesn't just produce milk.
She supplies dung, meat, leather and above all calves. An apparently barren cow, all skin
