[HN Gopher] Indian cows and buffaloes are going online
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Indian cows and buffaloes are going online
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 85 points
Date : 2022-04-26 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| random314 wrote:
| Not sure how this will work in this environment
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...
| adictator wrote:
| Never refer to wikipedia for anything even remotely connected
| to India. The cabal of Wikipedia editors responsible for
| content related to India is extremely prejudiced against India.
| srean wrote:
| Even if it were to be true (it is not), the incidents
| reported are backed up by actual news reports and other
| sources.
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| spitting nonsense
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| That was my first thought too
| amriksohata wrote:
| Cow smuggling is a much bigger issue, poor farmers have their
| cows stolen and it's their main livelihood, with fuel from
| manure and milk, yoghurt production.
| random314 wrote:
| None of the reported incidents involve stolen cows. Its
| basically lynching and similar incidents.
| L_226 wrote:
| I tried something similar in Australia in 2012, targeted at hobby
| to mid scale beef cattle farmers. The key concept was removing
| the superfluous transport step from seller to cattleyard
| (physical auction house), and just facilitating logistics between
| seller directly to buyer by running the auctions ourselves
| (online). As Australia is very large, transporting even a small
| percentage of your herd to a central auction yard is a
| significant expense, and non-sales require return shipping as
| well. Not to mention additional stress on the animals.
|
| I hope this particular solution increases animal welfare in
| India, when I have visited I have always been disappointed that
| "sacred" animals are allowed to eat garbage on the street.
| Possibly health tracking or similar can be implemented into this
| service, to allow buyers to check the animal's history. Yes,
| fraud will be an issue.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I have always been disappointed that "sacred" animals are
| allowed to eat garbage on the street.
|
| This is unfortunately a result of a combination of factors
| including low income levels and poor garbage
| management/disposal in some places. No one explicitly "allows"
| cows (as opposed to restrict them) to eat plastic and the vast
| majority of folks would rather not have the cows eat plastics
| accidentally.
| danans wrote:
| > I have always been disappointed that "sacred" animals are
| allowed to eat garbage on the street.
|
| The "sacred" part is extraneous.
|
| Consider that at one time the trash used to be all organic
| (mostly vegetable) waste and the cows were essentially
| transforming that into usable calories as milk. This was at a
| time when raw ingredients like grain were milled close to home,
| often in the home, so lots of cow-edible organic waste was
| produced. In that context, it's a great way of squeezing every
| usable calorie/nutrient out of what would otherwise be wasted.
|
| With time, agrarian India became industrial and then
| consumerist India, and with that came the advent of large scale
| disposable plastics and the culture of throwing them away, but
| without the waste management infrastructure of developed
| societies. This resulted in what you saw.
|
| What was once an ancient efficiency hack turned into an
| unpriced externality, with both aesthetic and environmental
| consequences.
|
| Of course there is also a lack of civic sense in allowing the
| situation to persist, but that is a present in any society (not
| just India) with high corruption and low institutional trust.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's just nuts to me all the examples there are of this basic
| pattern, where a traditional organic waste pipeline that had
| worked great for millennia was abruptly ruined in the 20th
| century by the introduction of plastic trash.
|
| All the major rivers are essentially this-- Yangtze, Nile,
| Ganges, plus a number of indigenous cultures which have
| disposal practices that very much do not work for long-lived
| plastic items (tossed off a cliff, etc).
| danans wrote:
| Arguably the same pattern exists in our historical energy
| consumption. We moved from societies that mined recently
| sequestered biomass for energy (AKA wood burning) to a
| society that mined biomass sequestered eons ago for energy
| (coal, natural gas, petroleum) without realizing soon
| enough that the former of biomass was mostly atmospheric
| carbon neutral and the latter type was not at all carbon
| neutral.
|
| And now we are paying the environmental consequences and
| trying to develop the global civic sense to fix the issue.
| Issaclabs wrote:
| A big challenge would be to solve for cattle smugglers in some
| states.
| adictator wrote:
| srean wrote:
| That there is a big smuggling racket shows that the laws are
| not in accordance with the demand and supply. The smuggling
| market exists because of them
| amriksohata wrote:
| Beef production is one of the worst climate carbon culprits
|
| On top of that poor farmers have their cows stolen a lot in
| India, this cattle smuggling causes massive issues as the farmers
| are already in poverty and the cos is their main livelihood for
| fuel from manure, grazing, milk and yoghurt.
| random314 wrote:
| The carbon footprint is from keeping the cows alive as they
| emit a lot of methane which has 10x greenhouse effect compared
| with CO2.
|
| I am not sure what carbon footprint has to do with cattle
| "smuggling" a term used by cow lynching mobs to accuse muslims
| transporting cows. The use of the word "smuggling" is key
| because the transporters actually own the cows, the lynch mob
| typically lynches the transporters and accuse the dead victim
| of illegal transport.
|
| Your choice to mix up climate change and mob lynching is really
| weird.
| duxup wrote:
| Other than what sounds like potentially lower fees to sell your
| cow overall. I don't see how this actually changes much as far as
| fraud and costs to move the cow and such goes.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| Because middlemen take your money and never give u cows.
| Generic facilities such as Police, law are not available for
| poor rural farmers in india. Moving cows is another big
| headache, people often run away with them.
| faheel wrote:
| It will also save the time and effort currently required for
| cattle trading by both sellers and buyers.
|
| For instance, Animall (one of the companies mentioned in the
| article) is working towards building an online marketplace for
| cattle (like Amazon) rather than just a discovery platform
| (like eBay or OLX) and will be handling verification and
| logistics (think "Amazon Fulfilled"). This would solve fraud
| and also reduce the cost and effort for sellers/buyers in
| trading cattle.
|
| P.S. I work at Animall
| Razengan wrote:
| I think the cows are self-driving.
| pradn wrote:
| Cows do come back home if left on their own :)
| the_common_man wrote:
| Why the downvotes ;-) Thought that was funny
| duxup wrote:
| HN tends to discourage silly comments. It's a preference.
| Jokey comments tend to get the most upvotes and that tends
| to just become most of the discussion ... and that's not
| really discussion.
| Cerium wrote:
| Cowboys would say otherwise.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Thank you for this. I'll have something to share with my
| Texan relatives.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Pfft, that's nonsense! Everyone knows cows are girls!
|
| (For ~legal~ HN downvoting purposes this comment is a
| joke.)
|
| Meta: I think jokes are occasionally okay but they've got
| to be good quality and mustn't be written by someone who
| thinks highly of their jokes ;)
| zabzonk wrote:
| Is it just me, but doesn't it look like the cow on the left is
| starving to death?
| [deleted]
| msrenee wrote:
| Neither of them are in great body condition. Not quite as bad
| as they might look first off. They're a different type of cow
| than we're used to seeing in the US and much of Europe. The
| hips are always a little more sunk in than in beef cattle and
| maybe more than most milk cattle.
| msrenee wrote:
| Sorry, the hips are always a lot more sunk in than say, an
| Angus cow. Not just a little bit. It's a pretty startling
| difference if you grew up in beef country. They've got a hind
| end more like your standard US and UK milk breeds.
|
| Edit: The ones in the picture are in the indicus
| group/category/I don't know what the current technical term
| is. Angus, Jersy, Holstein, etc would be in the taurus
| group/ect.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| I think they are buffaloes, but yes, both look malnourished.
| msrenee wrote:
| Definitely a cow. Just the indicus type rather than the
| taurus we see a lot more of in the US/Europe.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| They are cows. India has many indigenous breeds. https://agri
| tech.tnau.ac.in/expert_system/cattlebuffalo/Bree...
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| This is great. Protect our cows.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| Cattle theft is a big problem in India. It might sound silly to
| most people in west but being a still developing(poor) country
| with major population still being dependent on agriculture, large
| population owns cattle unlike US/Canada where a small percentage
| of ranchers are large cattle owners. It is very common for a
| small family in village to own a couple of cows and a big portion
| of their wealth is the cattle. Since cattle are not RFID marked a
| neighbor can easily steal the cows. Police has to regularly deal
| with such cases in rural India that someones calf is stolen. That
| poor family was depending on raising that calf or selling the
| milk for next few years. It is a serious economic setback for
| them.
| repiret wrote:
| I live in a region of the US that has more cattle than people,
| and cattle rustling is a thing here too. I think there is no
| type of property that people won't try to steal, so wherever
| there are cattle, there is cattle theft.
| amriksohata wrote:
| da25 wrote:
| Here we go. Another fanatic. Pfft
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's
| not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| SilasX wrote:
| > It is very common for a small family in village to own a
| couple of cows and a big portion of their wealth is the cattle.
|
| Which is actually the historically typical case! (Since the
| agricultural revolution, anyway.) The word "capital" even
| traces its meaning to "head of cattle":
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capital#Etymology
| InitialLastName wrote:
| There's a reason that most of the fines and taxes described
| in Leviticus are denominated in livestock.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| Oh, so this is like the app Tudder?
| pradn wrote:
| Milk cattle are important sources of income in rural India. Milk
| is taken twice a day - in the morning and in the evening. It's
| used in the household and any excess is deposited in the
| village's "milk center"/"milk bank". The collection center writes
| down the volume and quality of the milk brought in and the
| agriculturalist gets cash once a month. So it's a little
| financial bank in that sense, too. Of course, everyone mixes in
| some water to increase the volume of milk and get paid a little
| more. But the collection center can do some quick tests to tell.
| I'm unsure how effective those are.
|
| The cows/buffaloes produce milk every day as long as they're
| healthy and of the proper age. Feeding a calf as its growing up
| is an investment that pays off once they reach a proper age. But
| if a cow/buffalo doesn't feel well, it may stop producing milk
| for months a time, depriving the family of income. So there's
| risk. Each adult cow/buffalo can produce about 5000 RS a month in
| its prime. A government teacher might earn 10000-15000 RS a
| month. So even a few animals are significant source of income for
| rural families.
|
| There's significant labor involved in keeping the animals fed and
| milked. One might have to go out and get grass from common lands
| or store enough dry feed from the rice/wheat harvest for the
| months when fresh grass isn't common. Or one might have to take
| their animals out to the fields for the whole day so they graze.
| It's hard to take a day off and go on a trip in these
| circumstances. So usually someone's around to at least milk the
| animals.
| pkaye wrote:
| What do they do with the cow/buffalo if it stops producing
| milk?
| srean wrote:
| This has changed quite a bit recently so there is a before
| and an after. The before story is that they would be sold to
| slaughterhouses via intermediaries. Sometimes these
| slaughterhouses would be located out of state as slaughter is
| banned in certain states. Often the intermediaries would be
| from the Muslim community.
|
| With religion motivated cow protection being one significant
| platform on which the ruling party ran and won the elections,
| this has changed dramatically. There are two axes at play
| here, (i) the religious symbolism of cow that is dear to the
| Hindu supremacist ruling party and the (ii) Islamophobia axes
| of the same party. Consequently the cow slaughter has been
| drastically reduced in the states they control, by a
| concerted effort of the state machinery and by the actions
| murderous lynch mobs whose violence the government is,
| naturally, blind towards.
|
| Now this has created a reverse problem, especially Eastern
| Uttar Pradesh -- hordes of abandoned cattle that not only
| have been damaging crops but also has been killing people.
| This problem has risen to such a head that in the recent
| election campaigns the prime minister on his campaign tour in
| these regions promised magical solutions to this problem of
| stray cattle that would be revealed only after counting of
| the votes. To my knowledge no such reveal has happened, but
| scores of temporary and underfunded cattle shelters did crop
| up weeks prior to the election.
|
| As irony would have it their political platform of Go-raksha
| (protection of the cow) has morphed in to election campaigns
| of Go-se-raksha (protection from the cows). Of course to
| lighten this absurdity, the stray cattle are not referred to
| with the "go" prefix because that has been coopted by the
| said party. So these are referred to as 'awara pashu' (rogue
| animals) or "chutta saand" (stray bulls).
| 1024core wrote:
| _With religion motivated cow protection being one
| significant platform on which the ruling party ran and won
| the elections, this has changed dramatically. There are two
| axes at play here, (i) the religious symbolism of cow that
| is dear to the Hindu supremacist ruling party and the (ii)
| Islamophobia axes of the same party. Consequently the cow
| slaughter has been drastically reduced in the states they
| control, by a concerted effort of the state machinery and
| by the actions murderous lynch mobs whose violence the
| government is, naturally, blind towards._
|
| Even Congress party supported a ban on cow slaughter in
| various Northern states, going back into the 50s, long
| before BJP (the party you're referring to) was born.
|
| You may want to read this article, which goes over the
| story of cow-slaughter ban in India:
| https://scroll.in/article/759157/a-short-account-of-
| indias-l...
| srean wrote:
| I am aware (in the same way that I am aware that BJP
| weren't the first political party in India to introduce
| special requirements to regulate interfaith marriage),
| but that was a good article thanks. I am not sure,
| however, what the point of you repartee was. It does not
| contradict my comment comment.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| https://archive.is/1up20
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