The fatal attack on the police horse reminds us to condemn all exploitation of animals. It is because humans often exclude animals from their moral universe that they’re able to justify their enslavement or slaughter
One hopes that the efforts to bring the killers of Shaktimaan to justice will not peter out as the murder of this handsome police horse of Uttarakhand recedes further into the past. It was an utterly unprovoked and unpardonable act of culpable attempt to kill that needs to be punished according to the maximum provisions of law.
While the savage attack on Shaktimaan has justifiably raised a storm, the oppression and exploitation which horses and bullocks, as also other animals, suffer in India, also needs severe condemnation. One frequently sees in rural towns and villages, ill-fed horses, their ribs showing, being forced to carry, to merciless strokes of the whip, unconscionably heavy loads of people or goods or both. On one occasion, when this writer protested, he was told bluntly by the cart driver that it was his horse and he could do with it whatever he pleased. A policeman, whom this writer wanted to intervene saying that making a horse carry such a heavy load was illegal, said with a shrug, “Yeh hamara kam nahi hai (this is not my job)”
The policeman’s answer reflected the general attitude of law enforcers in India who are unaware of animal protection legislation and are utterly insensitive to the suffering of animals. This applies not just to India and Indian police personnel but the majority of people the world over. This has been both the cause and a result of the enslavement and abuse of animals, including their involvement in wars, throughout the ages, to say nothing of their consumption as food all of which tend to be accepted as a part of the natural order of things.
Besides, one cannot justify the enslavement or slaughter of animals without excluding them from the moral universe humans have created for themselves as the Judeo-Christian religious tradition does or rationalising their treatment on the grounds they had been created to serve humans, or they had no sensation of pain or suffering. René Descartes, the French positivist philosopher, regarded animals as automata, governed by the laws of physics and devoid of feeling and consciousness. Men, according to him, were different. They had souls residing in their pineal glands and, there, it came into contact with “vital spirits”.
The Vedantic and Puranic moral and spiritual tradition and its reflection in great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharat, included animals, along with humans and the gods, in the same moral universe. It emphasised the close links that existed between humans and animals and the need to impart equal justice to all. Unfortunately, as the ages unfolded, this tradition lost its grip on Hindus, the principal believers in the faith. Animals in India came to be treated with increasing savagery and particularly horses and elephants made an integral part of armies fighting wars. Thousands of them either suffered grievous injuries or were killed.
In Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, which unfolds as a first person narrative by its principal protagonist, Paul Baumer, contains a graphic account of the agony of wounded horses during World War I. Baumer soliloquies, “I have never heard a horse scream and I can hardly believe it. There is a whole world of pain in that sound, creation itself under torture, a wild and horrifying agony. We go pale. Detering sits up, “Bastards! Bastards! For Christ’s sake, shoot them!”
He is a farmer and used to handling horses. It really gets to him. As if on purpose, the firing dies away almost completely. The screams of animals become much clearer. You can’t tell where it is coming from any more on the quiet, silver landscape, it is invisible, ghostly, it is everywhere, between the earth and the heavens, and it swells out immeasurably. Detering goes crazy and hoarse, crying. “Shoot them, for Christ’s sake, shoot them!”
“They’ve to get the wounded men out first,” says Kat.
“We stand up and try to see where they are. If we can actually see the animals, it would be easier to cope with. Meyer has some field glasses with him. We can make out a dark group of orderlies with stretchers, and then, some bigger things, black mounds that are moving. Those are the wounded horses. But not all of them. Some gallop off a little way, collapse, and then run on again. The belly of one of the horses has been ripped open and its guts are falling out. It getsits feet caught up in them and falls, but it gets to its feet again.”
This is only a part of the narration; the rest is more horrifying. Remarque winds up the episode by writing, “Detering walks about cursing, ‘What have they done to deserve that, that’s what I want to know’. And later on comes back to it again. His voice is agitated and he sounds as if he is making a speech when he says, ‘I tell you this; it is a most despicable thing to drag animals into a war.’”
Detering, a character in All Quiet on the Western Front, was absolutely right. Animals have no stake in human conflicts. Yet they are dragged into it because humans have enslaved them. Humans, however, have not escaped the consequences. Animal abuse has often become a model for human abuse. In Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson shows how the mass slaughter of animals by Chicago meat packers and the moving overhead trolley line they devised to dress beef, and Henry Ford’s assembly-line technique modelled after it, provided the organisational model for the mass murder of six million Jews during the holocaust.
Patterson has shown how the slavery of domesticated animals has served as a model for human enslavement and oppression, and how people, who are planned to be or are treated thus, are described as animals. The notorious Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, described as “animals” and “No longer human beings,” the Jews he saw during his visit to the Ledz Ghetto early in World War II. Patterson points out that Hitler described Jews as a spider that slowly sucked people’s blood, a band of rats that fought each other until they drew blood, and as “the eternal leech.”
Hiranmay Karlekar