Indian cows and buffaloes are going online
economist.com
economist.com
Which is actually the historically typical case! (Since the agricultural revolution, anyway.) The word “capital” even traces its meaning to “head of cattle”:
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.
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.
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.
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).
And now we are paying the environmental consequences and trying to develop the global civic sense to fix the issue.
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.
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).
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...
With religion motivated cow protection being one significant platform on which the ruling party ran and won the elections, this has changed dramatically.
You can't really say BJP changed things "dramatically", if Congress was busy doing it 30 years before BJP was born!
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.
(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 ;)
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
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.
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.