Jallikattu ban: Time to stop talking bull and take steps to save the animal

Common sense has prevailed and the Supreme Court has stayed the ban on Jallikattu. This is not, however, a time for celebration, as much needs to be done to ensure that this doesn’t become an excuse for sending the bulls to slaughter. That being said, those bulls would have been sent to slaughter once they’d gotten too old anyway. The cycle is a confusing one, and things have reached this stage because of nothing other than the human ego.

Let’s go back in history for a bit. Yeru Thazhuvuthal, as the activity more commonly known as Jallikattu was originally called, literally means to embrace a bull. The word ‘Jallikattu’ actually comes from salli, meaning coins, and kattu, meaning tie/d. So the winner would need to be able to embrace and hold on to the hump while untying the coins. Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? It probably was. Considering what a fundamentally peaceful people we are, it almost certainly was just that simple.

But then came our hugely increasing numbers and the whole concept of being a veeran— a man of strength. What started as an exercise to see who could best get along with a bull morphed into an ugly spectacle of who could best dominate a bull. From a time when a select few would play, we came into a time when literally hundreds would play and, once it was regulated, 20-50 people.

Of course, what would best make a spectacle? A bull that was absolutely untameable. So, they made the one person who could not report them or complain about them suffer the brunt of their efforts to create such a spectacle. They tortured and abused hapless, helpless bulls in their efforts to get them riled up enough to create just that kind of spectacle.

Now let’s hear the arguments in favour of Jallikattu:

It is tradition: Wrong, it was either a different tradition or a bad one. I’m Tamil too and my culture doesn’t include torture, and if it did, it shan’t anymore. We also used to practise female infanticide widely. In fact, Usilampatti, a place famous for killing its female babies, is right in the Jallikattu belt. Are they next going to fight for the right to kill babies too?

It helps find the best breeding bulls: Hardly seems like a valid reason to excuse torture, does it? By all means, if the Kangeyam bulls help with the procreation of cows that produce A2 milk, please go on breeding them. There is no reason why the removal of this torture-mechanism has to automatically mean the death of our native breed.

The efforts to ban it are sponsored by the beef lobby: The concept of veganism vis-à-vis animal rights is pretty simple. We don’t hold with anything that comes through or aids animal exploitation, which means no meat, dairy, eggs, leather, honey, fur, cosmetics tested on animals, etc. So to maintain that we are funded by the beef or dairy lobbies is possibly the most insane thing one could say. We are against them just as much as we are against bulls being tortured for entertainment. One should watch the direct actions that take place across Chennai (and other cities around India and the world). These are groups of vegans who walk into places like Dominos, KFC, McDonalds, etc. and hold up signs showing how the meat and cheese on people’s plates came to be and talk against the consumption of animal products. Do you really think the beef and dairy lobbies are going to be able to talk to these people? Most of the members of the Animal Welfare Board of India are vegans, as are most of the animal rights activists that have campaigned against Jallikattu.

It’s really quite simple.There was definitely a time when we might have never objected to Jallikattu, but that time has long passed. Jallikattu has, for a while, been nothing more than a source of entertainment and betting for the richer farmers, who also use it as a showcase to pitch for and sell the semen of their stud bulls. The so-called “poor farmer” is no more an owner of a Jallikattu bull than I am.

Now this being Tamil Nadu, we’re going to have people immediately snapping photos of these bulls being held by obviously poor farmers and present that as proof. But a simple way to know that they’re lying is how everyone has been hearing non-stop that it costs farmers “lakhs” just to feed the bull for a whole year before the event. Now, does it really sound like a “poor farmer” would be able to spend lakhs on feeding one single bull? I’m constantly dismissed as an elitist, and yet I’ve never even had lakhs to feed myself and my family.

No, we need to face facts. It was our own massive ego as a species that caused us to turn what was once a display of the ideal relationship between a man and a bull into a real depiction of what it  is today— that of an owner and his slave.

It’s all very well to ask why other usage of animals is not being eradicated first, but then, they’re being eradicated too. Cockfights are banned, cart races are banned, dog fights are illegal, bulbul fighting is banned, camel racing has been banned, the use of animals in circuses has become so strictly regulated that many circuses no longer use animal acts, and those too will soon be gone. The next and final one on the list is horse racing, the last bastion of the British rule over us, and that has to go and it will.

Wake up! India is finally becoming the land it was promised to be. Mahatma Gandhi held that the greatness of a nation could be judged by the way its animals are treated. Laws protecting women and children are improving every day, and we’re moving on to the last front. Don’t start talking about how the Spaniards and the Americans do much worse to their animals, because yes, they do. Do you really want to be on par with a Spaniard or an American? We’re the culture that was based on the concept of Ahimsa, we ought to want to be that ideal!

Shame on us that we took this nonsense so far simply because of a few politically savvy bull breeders! Now, it’s time to stop talking bull and come up with some real plans to save the bulls.