A policeman in Gujrat led a herd of over 40 goats onto a train track to be brutally killed by an express, as revenge against their owner. In this spirit, tragically, we mark the beginning of the holiest of our annual celebrations in Pakistan.
Devout citizens roam the streets and bazaars, browsing through the herds of animals to find the right one for the sacrifice. Abdul Razzaq was a goat-herder, selling his animals along the GT road.
According to him, the policemen wanted to purchase a goat for their boss, at half price. When Razzaq refused to sell, the policemen reportedly untied his goats and herded them over to the tracks, where they were run over by a train coming in to Gujrat from Lahore.
Also read: Five cops booked for herding goats to rail track
Appallingly, much of the public appears to have reacted to the news with a bemused head shake, and not the sense of dread that naturally follows the thought of a live animal being mangled underneath 160 tons of moving machinery.
A goat may well be a piece of furniture, or more accurately, the cardboard box the furniture arrives in.
We toss it into the back of a Suzuki hard enough to demonstrate our indifference, but gentle enough to avoid unnecessarily damaging the goods.
We let our little ones play with it and drag it about.
We cut through the tape with a pair of scissors, rip open the sides, and remove its contents as we grumble about the packing material littered over the yard.
The policemen who led the goats to their painful deaths, were comfortably apathetic about their victims. To them, the animals symbolised nothing more than the property of their bête noire, its desecration being only as tragic as the financial loss it entails.
Livestock traders unload sheep at an animal market. —AFP
Not only are we monstrously cavalier about the suffering of animals, our soullessness signifies a departure from the Abrahamic tradition of sacrificing something we are actually emotionally invested it.
After all, it is what separates the slaughter of an animal from, say, the act of chucking one’s Xbox off a balcony as some contemporary form of sacrifice.
Is that an unfair analogy?
Yes, because the sight of a battered Xbox would send more tears rolling down a guy’s cheek than the vision of a hogtied goat bleating in agony over its mistreatment.
There is an abundance of imagery available online to prove our levity concerning this matter; including the picture of a famous cricketer grinning broadly as he dangles the severed head of a goat in front of a terrified child – a little girl who is clearly still too young to normalise such gore in her life.
It would be disingenuous to attribute to Eid day, a culture of animal rights abuse that prevails all year long. Goats, sheep and cows are held in cramped shelters, before being dragged across the abattoir floor.
Also read: Slaughterhouse rules: Is halal always humane?
One would eventually need to launch a discussion on our culture's excessive consumption of meat, and the forswearing of ethics by the industry in a desperate bid to serve our voracious appetite for inexpensive meats.
The only thing that’s different on Eid day is that the culture is made visible to us.
It is the time of the year when the veil is lifted off a menagerie of captive animals being tied, kicked, pushed, dragged and crammed into trucks on their way to an amateur, seasonal butcher taking multiple, often clumsy stabs at their necks with a blunt knife.
We may use this day to desensitise ourselves further; or we could use it to spare a serious thought to the animals upon whose pain we thrive, and what we can do to minimise it. Perhaps naively so, I keep hoping for the latter.