Ahimsa Crisis You Decide

Author(s): Sulekh C Jain
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

Page 30

market is growing and India is exporting 44% more beef than four years ago. Many Jains, particularly those in the older generations who spent their childhood in India, still hold the idyllic concept of the dairy cow that grazes in the pasture, and is provided with good care and has a good life. If milk or other products come from such an animal, how can that be morally problematic? In the first place, no animal products come from such animals. Most dairy products—wherever in the world they are produced, including India—come from animals kept in intensive conditions known as “factory farming” that involve unspeakable brutality and violence. Even those animals who are supposedly raised in “free-range” circumstances, or whose products are advertised as "organic," are raised in conditions that may be slightly less brutal than the normal factory farm, but there is still a great deal of violence, suffering, and death. Small rural milk producers in India use artificial impregnation, keep animals tethered, prevent calves from drinking milk, sell calves to the meat industry (even where cow slaughter is prohibited, buffalo slaughter is not and buffaloes make up about 50% of the India dairy herd), and sell cows for slaughter after no longer than ten years. The person who keeps only one cow on her or his property must keep that cow pregnant in order for the animal to give milk and this means that there will be a steady stream of calves. In most cases, most if not all of these calves will end up on someone's table. And whenever a calf is separated from her or his mother, there is tremendous suffering from that alone. Is a glass of milk or ghee or raita worth inflicting even that suffering? The picture of the happy cow grazing in the pasture bears no relationship to reality. The process of producing dairy—however "humane” it may be—involves himsa. The details of treatment under various systems of production and in different countries are matters of detail that go to how much harm is present in each system in each place.
3 Pratiksha Ramkumar, “Beef exports up 44% in 4 years, India is top seller,"
The Times of India, April 1, 2013, available at http://articles.timesofindia. indiatimes.com/2013-04-01/india/38188217_1_buffalo-meat-tonnestransport-and-slaughter.
30
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide