The curious case of Goa’s meat-eating cows
After Goa’s cabinet minister Michael Lobo reported that Calangute street cows had become habituated to eating chicken and fish scraps, cow welfare groups are trying to wean cows away
Mirth and consternation erupted nationwide last week after Goa’s cabinet minister Michael Lobo reported that cows in his constituency had developed stubbornly counter-intuitive dietary preferences. The politically ascendant 43-year-old, who represents the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the seaside tourism hot spot of Calangute, and holds simultaneous portfolios for waste management, ports, science and technology, and rural development, told a bemused public gathering in North Goa that 76 stray cattle lifted off the streets to a gaushala (cow shelter) were confounding rescuers. “Earlier, they were vegetarians, pure vegetarians. They would smell non-vegetarian food and move on, but now, they eat only non-vegetarian. These cattle do not eat grass. They neither eat gram nor special feed which is given to them.”
Lobo says his Calangute street cows had become habituated to eating chicken and fish scraps from garbage heaps, so “their system has become like that of humans”. Then the minister told his nonplussed audience that he had flown in “experts” to ensure the wayward ruminants were gathered back into the “pure veg” fold—“veterinary specialists have been roped in to treat them with medicine. It will take four to five days to turn the cattle into vegetarians once again.” Immediately, the internet was roiled with sarcastic memes and innuendo about the insubordinate beachside bovines. “Oh my Godse!” wrote @NembuKol on Twitter, “Now Sanghis will start pushing non-vegetarianism?” Meanwhile, @patralekha2011 spoke up for taurine pluralism: “Er, what about rights of cows? Like India’s hugely diverse human population, desi cows are also diverse. Why force Goa cows to be like UP cows?”
When the national media excitedly pursued the story, they traced it directly back to Kamlakant Tari, the outspoken president of the Gomantak Gosevak Mahasangh, which manages the facility where Lobo’s cows were sheltered, and who took the minister’s statements a step further still by claiming that foreign breeds like Jersey and Holstein are bred to eat meat by-products, while “desi cattle do not accept chicken and mutton at their own will”. The activist is at the forefront of a relatively desultory movement to ban beef outright in Goa, although many hackles were raised during the 2017 All India Hindu Convention hosted by the Sanatan Sanstha in Ponda, when the deceptively cherubic Sadhvi Saraswati, who leads the Sanatan Dharma Prachar Seva Samiti in Madhya Pradesh, trumpeted ferociously: “Those who consider it as a status symbol to eat the meat of one’s own mother should be hanged in public. Then only people will realize it is our duty to protect gaumata.”
While Lobo suggested his Calangute cattle would quickly resume eating grass and grain, back in 2012, the then leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the late Sushma Swaraj, had insisted that proper reconversion would involve a much more complicated process. She told a meeting of the Rashtriya Godhan Mahasangh, a cow welfare activist group, that she had outright declined American exports because “Indians will not even like to touch, not to speak of drinking” dairy products from cows that might have been fed meat-derived protein supplements, adding that, by contrast, Australian imports were strictly negotiated to come only from “vegetarian cows”. The BJP leader said she told then US ambassador Timothy Roemer that “it will take three years to take out the effect of non-vegetarian food given to cows”.
In fact, animal-derived protein supplements have been standard cattle feed components “since time immemorial”, according to the National Farmers’ Union in the UK. They are commonly utilized everywhere in the world, including India, although several countries banned the specific use of mammalian meat extracts after outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (more commonly known as mad cow disease) were traced to these practices. Yet the idea of fishmeal for farm animals is universal, and remains highly recommended by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Here, one inevitably recalls the great Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s all-time classic story, Our Non-Veg Cow, about her family’s pet Nyadosh’s very Bengali obsession with fried hilsa. On her last visit to Delhi, the late author recalled the spirited bovine “would never eat anything without fish or chicken”. And it’s entirely true that no veterinarian or doctor has ever suggested there’s anything unhealthy or un-natural about cows varying their usual plant-based diets.
Swaraj never clarified what “effect” could possibly require cows to undergo three years of ritual cleansing, but by now it’s amply clear that flamboyant reverence for cows is bedrock strategy for her colleagues in the BJP. Earlier this year, Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said the cow is the only animal which actually exhales oxygen, and living in proximity to cattle cures tuberculosis (also, massaging cows relieves breathing issues). Meanwhile, the terror-accused Pragya Thakur, who beat Digvijaya Singh to win the Lok Sabha seat for Bhopal, claimed her breast cancer was completely cured by drinking cow urine (doctors have noted that she also underwent a double mastectomy). Not to be outdone, researchers at Gujarat’s Junagadh Agricultural University reported the incredible “discovery” that there’s “3-10 mg of pure gold per litre of cow urine”.
Two years ago, former BJP minister Arun Shourie famously summed up his assessment of his party’s contemporary identity as “Congress plus a cow” but now it appears that acerbic truism needs an additional “pure veg” qualifier. This is because ostentatious abhorrence for meat, fish and eggs has become politically potent virtue signalling, despite the reality of the vast majority’s merry carnivorousness.
This contradictory dichotomy has been exhaustively researched by Balamurli Natrajan and Suraj Jacob, whose series of studies, encapsulated in the Economic & Political Weekly last year, found that only 20% of Indians are actually vegetarian, while at least 15% eat beef.
With penetrating insight, the two academics told Soutik Biswas of the BBC: “Any generalization about large segments of the population is a function of who speaks for the group. The food of the powerful comes to stand in for the food of the people. The term non-vegetarian is a good case in point. It signals the social power of vegetarian classes, including their power to classify foods, to create a ‘food hierarchy’ wherein vegetarian food is the default and is having a higher status than meat. Thus it is akin to the term ‘non-whites’ coined by ‘whites’ to capture an incredibly diverse population who they colonized.”
All of that applies to humans, but what does science tell us about cows? It’s true that all cattle are ruminants—part of the family which includes goats, sheep, antelopes, gazelles and giraffes—with a catch-all fore-stomach where hard-to-digest plant matter is broken down before passing further into the digestive system. But virtually every species has been observed eating other creatures as well—some African antelopes actually hunt for small birds and frogs, and every species of deer will readily eat carrion or dead fish when either is available. It’s also undeniable that cows hoover in bugs, worms, eggs and lizards indiscriminately while grazing, whether in Haryana or Holland, and it will take you exactly 2 seconds to find the (somewhat horrifying) internet videos of the notorious cow called Lal who greedily devours baby chicks.
When I reach him on the phone, Goa’s renowned veterinarian Gustavo Pinto asks me dismissively, “So what if these cows from Calangute have consumed non-vegetarian scraps?” The vastly experienced 61-year-old reiterates that cattle have evolved herbivorous digestive systems, but in the end a hungry animal will consume what is available. More relevant to him is the question of who is complaining about this so-called aberration, and to what end. Most pertinently, he points out hungry cows often fill their bellies with plastic, but there are no vociferous political lobbies turning that plight into a cause célèbre. Looking online afterwards, I found the very same Gomantak Gosevak Mahasangh, which houses Lobo’s strays, had extracted an astonishing 70kg of pure garbage (“plastic bags, nylon ropes, electrical wires, leather footwear”) from just one cow in 2016 .
Brooding on these ironies brought to my mind the Sahitya Akademi award-winning Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo’s lovely 2015 collection of stories Teresa’s Man And Other Stories from Goa, translated from the original Konkani by Xavier Cota, in which the uncannily prescient In The Land Of Humans tracks a young Dalit protagonist across the border from Karnataka as he is busily absorbed with the task of herding a few bulls destined for the meat trade. Halsid’du is duly elated by the chance to see the famous little state where he has heard everyone can be free. Like so many other Indians, he has grown up hearing the refrain: “See that when you’re grown up, you go to Goa. You’ll live like a human there.” But some distance before the final destination, his path crosses that of a raucous revivalist meeting, with speakers exhorting retaliation against those who eat beef. Just like that, “like a swarm of angry bees the mob set upon him. The great lovers of animals pounded Halsid’du to their hearts content. At the end of it all, he was left black and blue by those who lived in this land of humans.”
When I reach out to Mauzo, he tells me that extreme conditions—such as the Calangute cattle being abandoned to fend for themselves in inhospitably urbanized environments—would obviously wind up having unexpected ramifications. He says, “In our Hindu mythology, there’s the relevant example of sage Vishwamitra, who was compelled to consume the meat of a dead dog during times of severe drought. It was a matter of survival then, and it’s the same here. Why politicize the animals? This meaningless controversy is just another attempt to subvert and poison Goa’s tolerant atmosphere. It has nothing to do with cows at all.”
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First Published:30 Oct 2019, 03:02 PM IST
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