Waste-O-Meal! Stray Cows & Dogs having Sumptuous Lunch at Road Side ‘Dump Eatery’?
Mangaluru: Cows are one of the most controversial species in India with some attempting suicide for naming the cow as the mother of the nation, Gau Rakshak’s beating up people for not protecting cows and political parties banning beef to protect the animal that is worshiped in India. But amid the chaos around the Holy cow, few people truly care about what happens to the animals left to wander in the streets by their owners, falling victim to poisoning by consuming plastic waste, among other garbage. Here in Mangaluru, we have these saffron groups holding press meets or protests demanding to ban cow slaughter, illegal trafficking of cattle etc-but have they thought of bringing awareness among the public that many cows that wander on the streets suffer and die feeding on garbage, including plastic waste.
Today this revered animal suffers unimaginably at the hands of humans who exploit it incessantly. Cows are butchered mercilessly for their skin, meat and bones. Despite cow slaughter being illegal in most parts of the country, they are being killed mercilessly and brutally. They are also injected with hormones to increase the production of milk. Their calves separated at birth so that the entire milk produced can be sold, without understanding the pain of this all-giving mother. They are left scrounging for food at garbage dumps where they ingest plastic wastes and succumb to a painful death.
What most people do not know is that these gentle bovines, have a very complicated digestive system, and with continued ingestion of plastic over a period of time, it gets trapped in their stomachs forever with no scope for excretion or digestion, therefore getting entangled with different materials inside and turning hard, like cement in their rumens (the first belly of the cow). This is a ‘Plastic Cow’ and it is sentenced to a slow, grueling death. In fact, many NGOs have reported that surgeries on such cows that have been brought in on some occasions, have removed over 30-40 kgs of plastic from their bellies in addition to iron mesh, stones, sand etc. Read the article that was published on 13 August 2016, with the title http://www.mangalorean.
Due to infrastructure in the city which has led to a shortage of grass to graze, also due to scarcity of water, cattle are forced to survive on food waste, and eventually end up ingesting polythene from garbage dumps, which is not only fatal to cows, but also ends up contaminating milk which causes health issues and even cancer among those consuming the toxic milk. Just look at some places in the City, where a bunch of cows left to wander on the roads by their owners, feed on the garbage which also have plastic waste in it, and toxic material. And today, while traveling on the road adjacent to Padua College, I noticed a bunch of cows, and two dogs enjoying their meal on the garbage that was not cleaned by the Pourakarmikas of Antony Waste Management Cell, even though it was 1 pm. But it’s sad to note that these innocent cows, joined also by street dogs feed on waste dumped by ignorant citizens of Mangaluru, in spite of warning from the MCC not to dump waste on the street.
In conclusion, the problem with India is we have laws but we don’t implement them. Plastic bags below 40 microns are banned and rag pickers do not take them as they cannot be recycled and are ultimately strewn all over the places. So we have plastic heaps…all over and animals like cows, pigs feed on them. The kind of treatment cattle receives for the sake of mere profit and the way they are left to survive on garbage in the streets clearly shows the blatant hypocrisy behind the agenda of cow protection, which is being used to cause communal tension, impose bans and even for lynching people. Even as people are being persecuted and killed on suspicion of consuming beef, there seems to be little effort to stop this open murder of the cow. Just how is this right.
