Away From the Manger, the Grim Fate of Animals
They are not part of the Gospels’ account of the birth of Jesus, but livestock play a big role in the Christmas celebration. Depending on where you live, Nativity scenes you see this week might include oxen, sheep, cows, donkeys, even camels.
Christianity is not alone in placing animals in the middle of its rituals, but peace on Earth does not await all creatures. Consider the Gadhimai festival in Bariyarpur, in southern Nepal. Recently, as happens every five years, thousands of animals were brought to the town: goats, rats, pigs and more. And there they were slaughtered — a two-day sacrifice to Gadhimai, a goddess who is believed to grant wishes.
Most notable are the water buffalo, who are herded into a closed arena and decapitated by men with large curved knives while spectators try climbing the walls to get a view. On the heaviest day this year, 3,500 buffalo were killed, The Times reported.
The total number of animals sacrificed this year was expected to be less than 30,000, a big drop since 2009, when the number is believed to have been as high as 500,000. Activists have tried to stop the ritual, which has gone on for more than two centuries, and the Supreme Court has banned the government from funding it. But it remains popular, with hundreds of thousands of people from Nepal and India making the pilgrimage.
“It’s always fun to behead animals,” said Ram Aashish Das, who said he had slaughtered 30 buffalo. “If the tradition is so bad, why are so many people coming here?”
Jaya Kumar Ram, a Nepali pilgrim, said: “Only good and happy people come here. Because of blessings from the goddess, I have four children now and they are all in good health.”
For the Native American Makah tribe, hunting whales is not about animal sacrifice, but it is considered sacred, nourishing for body and spirit. Hunters train daily, while fasting and abstaining from sex. They pray each morning, then again after a kill to thank the whale.
Makah have not done this since 1999. The tribe has been whaling for at least 2,700 years, stopped voluntarily in the 1920s, then resumed after the Eastern North Pacific gray whale was no longer considered endangered. But since the one hunt 20 years ago, they have been stopped again by legal efforts of conservationists and animal rights activists. The Makah are trying to get the right to hunt again next year.
Theron Parker, who harpooned the whale in 1999, spoke of how that hunt had united his people, and how its absence had discouraged them. “It’s depressing to be way on top and then just to be dropped out and just kicked to the curb,” he told The Times.
Some Puerto Ricans have similar feelings over a loss in their own animal-rights battle: a new ban on cockfighting, in the United States territories.
Detractors find cockfighting particularly cruel, but those in the industry estimate it is responsible for 20,000 jobs.
“This is our life,” Hiram Figueroa, a rooster owner, told The Times. “If they take this away from us, what are we going to do?”
Cockfighting has been important on the island since Spanish colonial days, but Yolanda Álvarez, the former director of the Humane Society of Puerto Rico, is among many who feel no binds from this tradition.
“It has nothing to do with our culture,” she said. “And even if it did, culture is not static. Culture transforms itself.”
Water buffaloes, whales and roosters are all fair game.