by Brian Griffith.
Across the modern world, outrage against people who kill the wrong animals is on the rise. For example, when the Dalit (or untouchable) students of India’s Osmania University served beef biryani at a recent social event, about 100 radicals for cow reverence from a right-wing Hindu group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parisad (ABVP), tried to storm the gathering. After police stopped them, the protesters set fire to two cars and got into a stone-throwing, tear-gas canister-lobbing street fight. A Dalit festival organizer named B. Sudarshan said that the students were fighting for the “freedom to eat” what they liked. But Mr. Ramakrishna of the ABVP accused, “Today they are asking for beef, tomorrow they will want alcohol.”
Naturally, when people get emotional about their sacred animals, they sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the beasts’ attackers and defenders. Many Hindus were completely outraged when Dwijendra Narayah Jah published The Myth of the Holy Cow in 2002. Narayah Jah was actually protesting that cruelty to cows is common, but religious extremists took it as a war on faith rather than a criticism of hypocrisy. Right-wing religious nationalists issued death threats. Caving in to popular pressure, the Indian government banned the book, and large groups gathered for public book burnings.
Apparently, the public demand for Hindu holy law is on the rise. On March 2, 2015, Maharashtra State enacted a ban on killing cows, selling their meat, or even possessing “contraband” beef. The police made their first arrests on March 25. Responding to a tip in Malegaon district, officers seized 150 pounds of suspected cow flesh, as three butchers disappeared down the alleyways. For all those who wish to impose legal bans on eating whichever animals they most respect, the chief minister of India’s Haryana State, Manohar Lal Khattar, gave the following justification for theocracy in matters of food:
Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef. The cow is an article of faith here … freedom of one person is only to the extent that it is not hurting another person … Eating beef hurts the sentiments of another community, even constitutionally you cannot do this. The constitution says you cannot do something that offends me, I cannot do something that offends you … They can be Muslim even after they stop eating beef, can’t they? It is written nowhere that Muslims have to eat beef …
However, most modern crusades for animal favorites are fought in terms of economic warfare. And though our campaigns against killing the wrong animals are often matters of protecting endangered species, they are also matters of conflicting tastes. So, back in the 1980s, European activists including Brigitte Bardot and Paul McCartney helped secure boycotts to punish Canada for its seal hunts. Backed by rising public demand, the Greenpeace ship Sea Shepherd tried to disrupt the seal hunt, but was rammed and cornered by the Canadian Coast Guard, which charged the crew with “violating seal protection regulations.” To inform the divided public, Briton Busch’s 1985 book The War Against the Seals chronicled centuries of human atrocities against seal kind. Janice Henke’s Seal Wars! countered with an attack on the self-serving elite conservationists who would deprive the poor but noble folk of Newfoundland from their means of making a living. The Anglican bishop of the Canadian Arctic explained that Inuit seal hunters “can’t understand why people in southern climes who kill millions of animals for their tables and for their shoes are attacking the only economic means they have to stay off welfare.” The Inuit just did not seem to realize that seals are way cuter than cows or chickens.
As seal fur dropped from fashion over much of the world, more kinds of fur or hide fell under a moral cloud. Fur farmers raising nutria in Louisiana went broke, and hunting nutria for fur declined, so the populations of nutria vastly increased. Macy’s in New York terminated sales of Chinese “faux furˮ jackets, which were reportedly made from raccoon dogs. Advocacy groups convinced Macy’s that it was wrong to sell fur from any type of dog, and more importantly, that much of this imported fur actually did come from our beloved domestic cats and dogs. The protesters claimed that fur traders in China were killing around two million cats and dogs a year. The cat fur was labeled “katzenfelle,” “rabbit,” “goyangi,” or “mountain cat.” The dog fur was termed “Asian jackal,” “groupee,” “loup d’Asie,” and “corsac.” In this great unlabeling, one community’s fair game was revealed as somebody else’s sacred cow. Of course it was hypocrisy. We still regarded only some animals as sacred.