MM:India has failed to protect animals despite them being an integral part of our religious&cultural

My cousin,Aniruddh,a senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego has an ongoing love affair with a sulphur-crested cockatoo.Aniruddh studies music,language and the brain.Two years ago,a colleague introduced Aniruddh to Snowball,aforesaid cockatoo.Snowball isnt just your gardenvariety cockatoo.He has a very specific like,and it is,quite improbably,the Backstreet Boys song,Everybody.He dances to it.In an interview in June with the New York Times,Aniruddh spoke about his work and,specifically,Snowball.Throughout that interview,Aniruddh referred to Snowball by name,or as the bird or he.Never it.

In the late 19th and early 20th century,scientists declared animal anthropomorphism the attribution of human qualities to animals unscientific.Much has changed since.What separates humans from animals Cutlery Taxes Recreational sex A sense of justice What know now that the view of animals being non-sentient is wrong.In January 2010,researchers published findings showing that dolphins long known to be intelligent are in fact second only to humans in intellectual and learning ability.
Examples abound of the most unexpected conduct from animals.Perhaps none is more dramatic than the story of the lion named Christian,bought as a cub in 1969 by two Australians,John Rendall and Anthony Bourke from Harrods in London.Christian was later introduced in the wild by George Adamson.A year later Rendall and Bourke went back to see him,despite being told that he was now completely feral and could not possibly recognize them.The video of what followed at that meeting this enormous lion (and his two lionesses) all behaving like pussycats,evidently recognizing the two men is the kind of thing you want to watch repeatedly.

In his 1995 book,When Elephants Weep,Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows us an entirely different dimension while a more recent book by Marc Berkoff,The Emotional Lives of Animals,takes this work further.If Moussaieff-Massons arguments are provocative,his examples push the boundaries of what we believed to be true.He tells of Michael,a gorilla in a signlanguage program,who is hopelessly addicted to the singing of Pavarotti;Siri,an Indian elephant who flavours her hay with a delicately split apple and doodles on paper;Alex,an African grey parrot with a vocabulary that includes apologising;and Toto,a chimpanzee who,back in 1925,nursed his owner Cherry Kearton through a malaria illness.

In 1972,the Sierra Club Legal Defence Fund filed a path breaking action on behalf of 25 environmental organisations opposing Disneys $35 million dollar Mineral King ski resort near Sequoia National Park.The SCLDF lost that battle,but it won the war: Justice Douglass dissent is a writing of rare power,grace and passion,a vision of what environmental justice really means.More recently,lawsuits have been brought in America in the name of the threatened animal.There is now sufficient philosophical and even legal basis for granting defined rights to animals.

Despite being part of our religious and cultural heritage,modern India seems unable or unwilling to protect our defenceless,human or animal.The former sometimes find help.The latter rarely do.In Ahmedabad,Lisa Warden fights a lonely battle for humane treatment of stray dogs.The videos of what that municipality does to strays hauling them with iron tongs,the dogs screaming in pain and terror are stomach-churning.An annual sport,not too far now,is to tie noisy firecrackers to the tails of stray dogs.
Is this what separates us from animals

Even more horrifying are the reports from PETA.A prominent medical institute in Delhi keeps confined in small cages several dozen monkeys.Action was not taken till PETA exposed what was going on: mishandled,fearful animals in tiny cages,monkeys imprisoned for as long as a decade,one for 20 years.Video footage shows the trauma: monkeys rocking from side to side and circling endlessly.

We need this,we are told,for the greater human good.That seems very like the argument of the Nazis in developing their Final Solution: that caged monkey too has no name,just a number.

Take away a name and you reduce a personality to a statistic.The seven elephants killed by a train and the Jhurjhura tigress hit by a vehicle are not just erased numbers.These are incalculable losses of demonstrably sentient creatures.Their killings are unacceptable.Every one impoverishes mankind.