Over the years hundreds of thousands of buffalo, goats, birds and other species have been slaughtered in what is posited to be the world's largest animal sacrifice.
Source/Credit: The Huffington Post
By Arin Greenwood | July 28, 2015
"The time has come to replace killing and violence with peaceful worship and celebration."
It's estimated that as many as half a million animals were sacrificed at Nepal's Gadhimai festival in 2014. In four years, when the festival is to be held again, that number, organizers hope, will be zero.
The Gadhimai festival is held every five years in a town about 100 miles from Kathmandu. Dedicated to a Hindu goddess of power, the bloody origins are said to stem from a dream had by an imprisoned feudal landlord named Bhagwan Chaudhary, more than 250 years ago.
Chaudhary is said to have dreamed that the goddess Gadhimai "appeared to him and demanded a blood sacrifice in return for all his problems being solved," said N.G. Jayasimha, from Humane Society International -- a group that has long called for an end to the twice-a-decade killings.
When he woke up free of his confinement, Chaudhary "could not bear to sacrifice a human," Jayasimha said. Instead, he promised to sacrifice five animals with the help of a shaman, who "began the sacrifice with a token offering of a few drops of blood from five parts of his own body," followed by the killing of a single animal of five species: a buffalo, a pig, a goat, a chicken and a rat.
Over the years, though, hundreds of thousands of buffalo, goats, birds and other species have been slaughtered in what is posited to be the world's largest animal sacrifice.
"I don’t feel guilty about slaughtering the animals because it will make Gadhimai very happy. She has given my family a very good life and this is my way of saying thank you to her," festival-goer Samu Patel told Al Jazeera last year. "People make money by slaughtering animals, but for me, this is also spiritual satisfaction. I have beheaded around 59 buffaloes till now."
The animals are said to be deprived of food and water before their sacrifice during the two-day festival -- and then their deaths are shockingly slow and cruel.
It's a level of brutality some argue is out of line with the Hindu philosophy of nonviolence.
[more ...]
Read original post here: Nepal: Hindu Festival Organizers Call Off Mass Animal Sacrifice
This content-post is archived for backup and to keep archived records of any news Islam Ahmadiyya. The views expressed by the author and source of this news archive do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of Ahmadiyya Times. Ahmadiyya Times is not an organ of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, nor in any way associated with any of the community's official websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. Any comments irrelevant to the post's subject matter, containing abuses, and/or vulgar language will not be approved.