riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (07/27/84)
> /**** uiucdcs:net.misc / nowlin@ihu1e / 10:50 pm Jul 22, 1984 ****/ > > I've never understood how Hindus could allow their children to starve > while sacred cows wandered around the countryside. I missed the original of this statement, but to add to uiucdcs!schwager's rebuttal, let me repeat something I posted to net.followup nearly a year ago: >> From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP >> Subject: Cow worship != starving children >> >> Brian Crumby (bdc@drux3.UUCP) recently posted an item to net.general >> reviving the old wives' tale that relates starvation in India to cow >> worship. Sorry, Brian, but you're mistaken -- anthropologists and >> economists are now pretty well agreed that the "holy cow" is an essential >> part of the economic and ecological system in rural India. The cow: >> >> -- provides milk products, an extremely important part of the Indian >> diet; >> >> -- provides dung, the most important source of fuel for cooking and >> heating in peasant India, a fuel which competes very favorably >> with either expensive petroleum products or ecologically disastrous >> firewood; >> >> -- provides the "tractors" of peasant India, bullocks, which are >> affordable to peasants to whom our kind of tractors and the fuel >> to run them are hopelessly out of reach; >> >> -- does not substantially compete with humans for food since it eats >> primarily garbage and agricultural by-products which are inedible >> to humans; >> >> -- gets eaten eventually anyway: although cattle are not raised and >> slaughtered for beef in India, cattle which die of natural causes >> are butchered by a special caste of untouchables who tan the hides >> and eat the meat. >> >> The old "why don't they just slaughter the cows?" argument is sheer ethno- >> centrism. >> >> As for references, there's a good chance that this subject will be brought >> up in any good freshman anthropology textbook or introduction to India. A >> slightly radical statement of it is to be found in "Cows, Pigs, Wars and >> Witches" by anthropologist Marvin Harris. --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") --- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle