riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (10/20/83)
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.