Beating animals

**Warning: This blog contains strong language, including the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’. If words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ offend you, then you advised to read on with caution**

Nepalis are cruel towards animals. Standard disclaimers apply, you can’t attribute a single behavior or attitude to an entire population, yada yada, more intelligence insulting caveats. Whatever. Out in the gaun, in my experience, Nepalis, by an overwhelming margin, show a complete lack of respect towards non-human animals, in some cases presenting behavior that borders on psychopathic.

Does my vegetarianism bias me, or render me overly sensitive to animal suffering? It’s an irrelevant point, but I have no shame in proclaiming that I am biased against wanton cruelty aimed at small defenseless creatures. Most Americans, whether they would admit it or not, are in fact animal lovers, and even if I can’t get everyone on board with the notion that cows and chickens and pigs and fish deserve the same consideration we give to dogs and cats, I think the following examples of vicious animal abuse that I have witnessed in this culture will be enough to outrage even the most, shall we say, unconcerned people back home.

A couple of months ago, I witnessed a drunken Nepali man savagely beating a small puppy, whom I had taken to calling “snoopy puppy”, owing to its piebald likeness to Charlie Brown’s iconic canine pal. The incident occurred during a Red Cross meeting that was taking place at my house. I had had an outstanding day – led a successful lesson for my 11th grade English students at the public school, a lesson they were begging me to repeat as I walked home with several of them – and was feeling good about myself and Nepal and my whole situation as I sat down to the meeting. After a few minutes, a sharp yelp cut through the talking, followed by another, and another. Nobody else paid much notice, but the sound – clearly one of a dog suffering terrible pain – distressed me to the point that I had to get up and investigate. Turns out, some asshole that lives down the road from me was chasing snoopy puppy and striking it with a large stick every time he had the poor creature cornered. I followed the scene for a while in horror, until this guy, who you could charitably describe as a drunken fool, picked up snoopy puppy by the neck and hurled him into a pile of firewood. Not like a gentle toss from the pitcher to first base on an off-the-end-of-the-bat dribbler back to the mound, but like a relay home from the centerfielder to nail the runner rounding third. Every cry of pain from this tiny, helpless dog just seemed to embolden our proud village idiot, and he stomped over to where the puppy was whimpering and trying desperately to stand up and escape, ready to bludgeon it some more with the small tree branch in his hand. At this point, I was in a position to intervene, and did so. I barred his path towards snoopy puppy, and as he approached me, wrestled the stick out of his hand and tossed it over the side of the hill. The look of affront this occasioned on the man’s face staggered me. He thought that I was in the wrong? Apparently I was. At this point, you might think that the actions of one inebriated jackass should not stain Nepalis as a whole. I agree. But how were the dozen or so men, who were sitting around my front porch at the Red Cross meeting, reacting to this whole scene? They were laughing. Fucking LAUGHING. My host dad, with a pitying look on his face, stifling a chuckle at my poor, misguided gallantry, waved me off, beckoning for me to rejoin them and let the beating continue unimpeded. Then, my host brother grabs me by the arm and starts to pull me out of the way. Not to worry, he assures me, the puppy belongs to the man brutalizing it, and the man is angry because the puppy keeps running away from home, and he is just punishing it, so everything is okay. Oh, well gosh, I didn’t realize that this was the guy’s own dog. That’s a horse of an entirely different color. Are you kidding me? I mean, no shit the dog keeps running away from home. I would run away too if I had to live under the tyranny of this lunatic.

This is an extreme example. But it keeps with the general attitude people display in regards to animals. Shall we consider a few more cases? Let’s turn our attention to the kids that fling around the cat like it’s a hacky sack, or tie its paws together, or tug violently on its ears, or drag it by its tail. Or all the times that people mercilessly pelt stray dogs with rocks, punishment for the serious crime of, you know, walking down the street. Just today (perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back – to use, I think, an apposite metaphor – in terms of compelling me to write this blog) I watched as a man – grown man, not a child – who works at the VDC office (by which I mean sits around our house next door to the VDC office and chats with my host dad all day) took a long string of yarn, tied it around a kitten’s neck, and began swinging the cat around by its neck like a living, breathing (although perhaps not) Yo-Yo. All the while, he had a lobotomized grin smeared across his face. He was so pleased with himself, at this little diversion he had created.

What is it? Is your life so pathetically meaningless and vacant that you really have to resort to animal abuse to pass the time? Do you feel so powerless in your existence that to remedy it you have to exert your power over living things that can’t possibly defend themselves against you?

These incidents are indicative of attitudes that prevail throughout the culture. Even cows, the sacred animals of the Hindu faith (in Hindu belief, cows are the corporeal manifestation of the goddess Laxmi), which all Hindus are proscribed from eating, don’t escape. It’s heartbreaking to see all the emaciated cows wandering the streets in Pokhara, as Nepalis toss rocks at them and beat them (ostensibly this is because the cows create a nuisance for shop owners, but if you’re going to venerate them as Gods, then maybe you could find a better solution for them than vagrancy). There are holy days set aside in Nepal for the worship of certain animals, from cows to crows. At first, I thought this was novel, something admirable about the culture. Now it just sickens me as more religious hypocrisy. Worship the animal one day, go back to terrorizing it the next. Not that I mean to single out Hindus – the Abrahamic faiths are rife with their own nonsense traditions, customs, and beliefs, and certainly are not short on hypocrisy. And it was Gandhi who said that a society could be judged on how it treated its animals. But if it sounds like I’m taking a swing at Nepali culture – I am.

There is no value in pretending that Nepalis are some quaint, exotic ‘other,’ and that everything about their culture is sunshine and miracles. If I’ve taken any cross-cultural lesson from my nineteen months here, it’s that the notion of ‘other’ is a false one. We are all imperfect creatures struggling with our humanity. That struggle presents itself in various manifestations of culture, from broad and ancient concepts like religion to more contemporary phenomena like office etiquette. But we all share a common thread in our ambitions, our sense of the importance of our values, our capacity to love, or – in this case – to perpetrate acts of hatred. And I can’t think of another way to describe senseless brutality enacted upon animals but as stemming, at some level, from a place of hate. Nepalis are no different from any of their other brethren who walk this planet. They are flawed, just like everyone else, and a callous indifference to the welfare of animals is one ubiquitous flaw. Grotesque cruelty is not okay simply because it’s culturally accepted, and so I’m not going to give my host country a pass on this one. Perhaps it’s unfair to call out the village drunk or take shots at the laziness of the VDC officer on a blog with no contextual lens for readers in the US, but I don’t give a damn. If you are an adult and treat an animal the way that I’ve seen so many people here treat animals, then as far as I’m concerned you’re fair game, and everyone who reads my blog (which isn’t a sizeable audience anyway) is going to know exactly what a little piece of shit you are.

I’ve voiced my displeasure at the appalling treatment these animals endure. My pleas usually fall on deaf ears, or, more aggravating, garner scornful laughter. I can’t say what the underlying cause of this behavior is. Probably a multitude of factors. Parents don’t impose much discipline upon their children; people out in the villages are simply ignorant and backwards. The list, I’m sure, doesn’t stop there. I suppose I ought to reiterate that not everyone acts this way, of course. I’ve met some Nepalis who show great tenderness and care for their companion and even economic animals, and who cringe at the violence they see just as I do. It’s difficult to live with. Maybe most people in the world are this way. And certainly we have our share of people in the US who commit heinous atrocities against animals. But in the US, if you pummel a puppy with a baseball bat, chances are you’re going to spend some time locked in a cage, just like the animals you abuse. I wish I could say that the animals in Nepal enjoyed the same protections as their counterparts across the ocean. Maybe such laws do exist here, though no one I have asked has confirmed this. What’s more, even if the law existed, out in the rural parts of Nepal, the police don’t, so it wouldn’t make much of a difference. In this case, I feel like home really is a half a world away.