Sunday, March 29, 2015

elephants in Delhi

Elephants are revered in Hindu culture and they have been making appearances at weddings and functions in the Indian capital for generations, but their presence on the streets of Delhi may soon come to an end.
The government is no longer issuing new licenses to elephant keepers who are struggling to look after the animals in the growing city and environmental groups say it is time working elephants were taken off the streets.
For some reason, the framework of this situation reminds me of the anti-abortionists who deplore abortion with much high-moral-dudgeon breast-beating, but seem to have strikingly few adopted children.

Those proposing to withhold elephant licenses have education, jobs and income and can afford to be 'kind' to elephants ... which I applaud since I like elephants. But it is interesting that the same humanitarians cannot extend similar kindness and try to eradicate the poverty they would insure with their kindly philosophies.

Elephants do not deserve to be chained up and manipulated.

Do people?

2 comments:

  1. One would think not, born innocent, etc. But then again, we're the ones mistreating elephants, draft horses, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A week or two ago when my country's prime minister was reportedly ill in intensive care at a local hospital, I was momentarily informed by the local news that a Singaporean girl Huang Lin Davina in her twenties had just passed on in North America. Eventually my founding prime minister passed away a day or two later, today he is said to be cremated instead of buried.

    I don't know what innocence may be today, much lesser why some elephants are chained up while others roam the jungles gently and quietly, still, when I read in the news about how Davina was fighting a brain injury in a North American hospital while a prime minister was in a Singaporean hospital dying as well, it would sound good and feel good to suggest back then that shit happens to everybody whether young or old. Yet it just didn't sound right.

    I might have chanted a few Buddhist prayers over the past weeks.

    My celibacy/continence and vegan/fasting practices are still having room for improvement.

    :) What I do know though, is that I seldom handle elephants in person much lesser chaining them up.

    But I really don't have a say about what the Muslims are up to in the Middle East, I don't really know the differences between Syria, Iran, Qatar, Yemen I thought they were all using the same books.

    ReplyDelete