Please spare the poor animals this Eid!

Year after year in Lahore (my home town) the festival of Eid-ul-Adha
is heralded by a mass migration of animals of different kinds into the
city. The animal sellers take root in every usable nook and
corner. The presence of these expected guests marks the beginning of
an intense war of wits between the animals, the animal owners, the
local civil servants and the customers that lasts until after the
Eid.

No one knows exactly who fires the first shot, but pretty soon the
battle is in full swing. There is a demand for
animals, and the merchants come into town expecting to take home
enough cash to retire for life. Supply is artificially constricted to
enable price hikes. And of course, there is also the intense
comraderie between the different merchants, for a month even intense
rivals become close allies and set ridiculously inflated prices for their
animals. It is not rare to hear of animals that cost as
much as a car. An average person has to decide between feeding his family for a
month or enjoying all twenty pounds of meat from his sacrificial
animal. For many people on the street, therefore, sacrifice is mostly
a wish that is seldom realized. By simple laws of economics all of
these exaggerated prices should not be sustainable, but that's part of
the game -who gives in first, the buyers or the sellers? The buyers
are bound by tradition to offer some sacrifice but limited by the
reach of their pockets. The sellers have
the comfort of knowing that all of their excess inventory will be
readily bought by the local butchers. And of course there are the
rich, who with their dubious sources of income can afford almost
anything. A common man on the street, however, has to find other ways out: not
sacrificing at all or choosing to pool money with others for a
communal sacrifice.

Things are not so rosy for the merchants either. Apart from the normal
loss of animals to disease, accident or theft, the merchants have to
deal with the corruption of the local civil servants. The police, for
example, does not hesitate to demand its "fair" share in the profits of
the merchants. After all there is no better protection against the
wrath of the police than the same police itself! And then there are
other civil servants who are higher up in the food-chain. Their share
of the animals is automatically delivered to them without asking many
questions. Over the years, this form of corruption has evolved to such
a sophisticated level that now much of this happens silently and the
consequences of not following this custom are implicitly
understood. The merchants in turn try to compensate for these
"losses" by cheating their customers. Apart from their exaggerated
prices, they will sell diseased and sick animals. Another favorite
trick is to feed the animals a lot of water so that they weigh
more.

Now let us suppose that you have decided to take the plunge and are
offering a sacrifice of an animal. Some days in advance you will go
out shopping. After intense haggling, and alternating between
threatening the merchant and flattering him, you will successfully
acquire yourself something. The animal is brought home, groomed, fed
and cleaned after. Hopefully over the next few days, the kids in the household
will not get overly attached to the animal. Then the Eid day arrives.
After the prayers, you will come home, and start looking for a
butcher. If you are lucky, you will find yourself a professional who
will prepare the animal properly but will fleece you along with the
animal in the process. Otherwise, you will probably be stuck
with a clumsy amateur who will not only fleece you anyway, but after
killing the animal brutally, will not prepare the meat properly
either.

Of all that these poor animals have to endure, the sacrifice itself is
the most difficult to watch. The animal is sacrificed with a razor
sharp knife. Its throat is slit until it bleeds to death. The animal
struggles after it has been butchered for a minute or two before
becoming completely still. Everytime that I have watched the sacrifice
(I have never had the courage to do it myself), I have felt an intense
sorrow descend upon me. Watching an animal die for one's own
sustenance is a haunting experience. Haunting enough to make one stay
away from eating meat for a long long time. And sometimes things are
worse: With an amateur butcher, the death of the animal is intensely
painful and brutal. With a coarse knife, he will subject the animal to
unimaginable pain before finally killing it.

The saga does not end here. The sacrifice produces three different
end-products: the edible meat of the animal, the inedible parts of the
animal and its hide. The edible meat is distributed to family and
neighbours (and also cooked at home). The inedible parts (stomach
etc.) end up in garbage, where over the next few days, they cause an
incredible stench of decay. It's sad but before the city authorities
take any appreciable measures to clean up the mess, "human scavengers"
and wild animals rummage through
garbage to collect these for their own food. Finally there is the
hide, which eventually makes its way to the leather industry of
Pakistan. Before it does so, it goes through a number of middle-men
whose sustenance in turn depends on the animal skins. The traditional
destination of the animal skins has been the mosques and the
orphan-houses, which in turn sell them to others. Ideally, the income
generated from the sale of these skins should be used for the upkeep
of mosques and other charitable institutions, and for allowing the
under-previleged in the society to participate in other
festivals. That usually does not happen -the only observable
difference one sees from this income is in the girth of a few people's
bellies.

So then the big question is "Why?" Why do year after year
Hajjis (charged by their newly renewed faiths) and non-Hajjis (charged
by their desire to resurrect their faiths) descend upon millions
of hapless animals? I understand, this event is
to commemorate the great sacrifice of Prophets Ismail and Abraham, but
with all due respect, do we really need to slaughter all of these
animals? For one, remember, Ismail himself was not slaughtered, but
almost slaughtered, so can we not also do the same? Like put them
under the knife and then let them go, like what happened to Ismail?
Or, if we must, just scare them for a second (by reading aloud to them
the latest news from across the Muslim world)? If Eid-ul-Adha
really commemorates the personal sacrifice of Ismail, doesn't it make
sense that we should celebrate it with some personal sacrifice of our
own instead of taking the life of an innocent animal?

Maybe once there was a way in which this sacrifice served some social
purpose but it clearly does not do so today. What I have described of
Lahore is only one little bit of this saga. Consider what happens in
Saudi Arabia. This year also hundreds of thousands of goats, sheep
and camels will be sacrificed. The sad part is that most Hajjis cannot
utilize the meat of their sacrifice anyway -they cannot carry it
around with them! In addition, these thousands of tons of meat cannot
even be stored in deep-freezers immediately. The result is that a
large fraction of meat is left unclaimed and untended for, and ends up
getting buried in ground so avoid mountains of decaying flesh in the
sweltering Arabian heat. What an inexcusable waste of
life! Would it not be better if all the money and effort spent on
acquiring and killing these animals was used for something
constructive? Like having an education fund for the illiterate masses
across the Muslim World? Or supplying basic necessities of life, clean
water, food and sewage to the suffering millions in the Muslim
World. Must we always stick to traditions blindly even when they make
no sense?

I decided many years ago that I will never sacrifice an animal in my
life. My humble suggestion to you also is to stop the carnage, and if you
must commemorate the sacrifice of Abraham and Ismail, do so by
sacrificing your time and your resources for some worthwhile cause,
and not by putting some poor animal under the blade.