CANINE AND BOVINE PHONIES

A girl sitting and leaning from a two wheeler, and feeding a stray dog in one of the busiest and crowded byways in Trivandrum pushed me in to a retrospective mode. It has become a fashion statement these days to be an animal lover, or an environment activist. There are hordes of these lovers whose blood will boil at the sight of slightest misery to these canines and bovines.  Tourists come from as far as America to the beaches of Kerala and feed the strays. Off course one can presume that these are the wealthy and affluent, who can afford to catch a business class to the third world India and feed these homeless vagrants called the street dogs. Then there are a certain class characterized by the paternal and maternal love lavished up on the four legs. Here, the otherwise well to do human off springs are brushed aside, and demoted to a secondary level of hierarchy. Dogs and cats occupy the preferred seats in the family vehicle and at times safety seats and seat belts are mandatory, while the most humane of lot are left to fend off for themselves.

The main stream films always portraits the lovely girls as an animal lover, she always works for an NGO, taking care of the poor and needy strays – sometimes human and more often canines. I prefer to give a wide berth to these films and also the activists, whom I suspect has nothing better to do. When more than half the humanity is reeling from famine, civil wars, killings in the name of race, religion and ethnicity, it is really disheartening to see these delusional show offs petting and taking care of the lesser of the creations. These classes of righteous and indignant bipeds are the greatest phonies that we can see around. I invite them to visit an African state or the remote villages of India and challenge them to be as gracious and big hearted as they are, or as they want to believe.  It is a great irony that these cattle lovers can butcher each other in the name of religion and then feign, cry and blabber at the slightest hint of bovine slaughter.

Humans are special and whatever these vet lovers can say cannot change it. The nature has given us the strength and the wisdom to rule over the lesser forms – eat them for our hunger and for sustaining ourselves.  It would be rather good and much less waste of the precious resources if these phonies can redirect their energies to nobler of the tasks and help the millions of their own brethren, rather than vouching for the lesser and more savage of the habitants.