They start getting silly made-up titles too once she's run out of Style Designer or Senior Stylist. I'm sure she's given some people titles like Commander of the Haircut or Queen of the Scissors. Boy do they get expensive when they acquire titles like that.
Anyway, the shocking article I read in the paper at the salon was about animal sacrifice in Nepal.
Plans to sacrifice more than 500,000 animals during a two-day religious festival in Nepal this month have met with the wrath of animal rights activists who have called for the 300-year old ritual to be banned.
Every five years the tiny village of Bariyapur near Nepal’s southern border with India is swamped with blood as hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees flock to the local temple to take part in what is thought to be the world’s biggest ritual slaughter.
This year it is expected that about 500,000 animals, including about 25,000 buffaloes, will be offered to the Hindu goddess Gadhimai by devotees who hope that in return she will answer their prayers. Proceedings begin with the sacrifice of two wild rats, a rooster, a pig, a goat and a lamb.
Opponents of the ritual say it will harm the reputation of Nepal, one of the world's poorest countries. Pramada Shah, of Animal Welfare Network Nepal, said: "By perpetuating such a mass massacre in the name of religion, culture and tradition in the 21st century, we are projecting Nepal as barbaric."
Activists have also claimed that the slaughter is a health hazard. Govinda Tandon, of the Stop Animal Sacrifices Alliance, said: "There are rivers of blood for months with carcasses lying everywhere. The grounds are dominated by vultures, while the stench makes life miserable for people living nearby.
3 comments:
Oddly I have been having this same discussion elsewhere on a totally different topic. Intellectually and emotionally I dislike animal sacrifice. I find it a useless waste of life, resources, animal husbandry and so much else.
Abattoirs perform the same function here, of course, but the meat is used for food. It appears not to be so used in Nepal, but what do I know?
The thing about these stories is that we wish to impose our own western morality and western culture upon a totally different civilisation. I think that is wrong and smacks of imperialism.
If we believe that something is inappropriate we may seek to educate, but we may not command nor may we direct.
What really annoys me is when we believe that we are correct primarily because we are white and western. We fail to realise that the civilsations we think we are better than go back way before ours, and we often choose not to bother to learn about them before seeking to direct them.
If we are correct it is by consent, not by bullying.
So I find the sacrifice not to my taste. But this is not my religion either.
But what if it was part of their religion to make human sacrifice? Should we let them do that too because we don't want to be western imperialists?
E, Many would say that humans are being killed because of religiously inspired dogma all the time; Islamic theocracies regularly dispose of homosexuals, apostates, naughty women etc. Catholic dogma kills thousands in sub-Saharan Africa and I even read recently about a murder trial in Texas where jurors consulted the Bible before deliberating, all done supposedly to keep various invisible Deities happy.
Just because a culture is old doesn't make it right or moral, even if it is, then the old'ness isn't the reason. I think TT is right about consent though, but the problem is always consent of who?, the village, the religion, the country, the world etc. A large number of people in Nepal aren't even Hindu.
This is a bizarre practice by any standards though; if these people are as poor as it appears then you'd think they would want to hold onto their animals for food?? The power of superstition never ceases to amaze me.
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