Overview of the 2014 Gadhi Mai sacrificial festival at Bariyarpur, Nepal. This is the Humane Society International drone photo, with enumeration by ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton.
Drone photo permits body count
Debate about the numbers of buffalo sacrificed at the November 27, 2014 Gadhi Mai sacrificial festival at Bariyarpur, Nepal and the numbers of human participants and sacrificial devotees present should be ended by this drone photo of the corrals where the sacrifices were conducted: the toll was significantly lower than the numbers of cattle slaughtered almost every day to supply the meat-eaters of most major cities in the world, including the largest cities in India, where slaughtering cows is illegal in most of the nation, but slaughtering buffalo is permitted.
Starting with an enlarged copy of a Humane Society International drone photo posted to Facebook, said by protesters to show 5,000 buffalo, ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton counted the buffalo in sets of 100, differentiated by color to help minimize the risk of counting errors.
Seven hundred buffalo could be relatively clearly distinguished, with perhaps 50 more huddled in the farthest corner of the corral from the drone. The numbers of participants and spectators present appear to be only marginally more than the numbers of buffalo sacrificed.
Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Geoff Geiger photo)
Video from the 2009 Gadhi Mai sacrificial festival suggests that as many as 2,500 buffalo were sacrificed then. Both protesters and the priests promoting the festival have claimed that it involves numbers from 10 to 200 times higher.
(See also: Ignoring Thanksgiving massacre, HSUS president Wayne Pacelle denounces animal sacrifice in Nepal; Supreme Court of India ruling covers tracks on Gadhi Mai sacrifice; Exposing the truth of the Gadhi Mai sacrificial slaughter; Books shed light on sacrifice in Nepal; and The origin of the Gadhi Mai sacrifice.)
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I love how you work with numbers. Truth is always good, thank you.
Sharing to social media, and thanking you.
Great job counting the toll from Gadhi Mai. Who took the drone shots? I remember seeing a post on my Facebook feedback asking to help crowd source it but I can’t remember who posted it??
My understanding at present is that Animal Nepal fielded the drone, funded by Humane Society International, but the details are unconfirmed. According to Lucia de Vries, executive director of Animal Nepal, local authorities prohibited further drone flights after the first one. I would have liked to see a complete set of drone shots or video, covering the entire area. It is alleged that further sacrifices and sacrifices of other species were conducted somewhere beyond the scope of the drone image that we have. There is nothing in the background of that image to suggest that anything else was attracting a crowd in the vicinity, but anything else going on would have been worth quantifying. Incidentally, some sources have noted that some sacrifices were conducted at the Bariyarpur temple two days after the Gadhi Mai festival. This is not remarkable. Temple sacrifices are the major source of meat for most Nepalese, and most of the temples that conduct animal sacrifice function much like the village custom slaughterhouses that were common in the U.S. before the advent of supermarkets with refrigeration. Such temples keep more-or-less business hours, sacrificing some goats and poultry almost every day. Because buffalo are much more expensive, they are sacrificed and eaten much less often.
Excellent article on exposing animal sacrifice, especially the recent one in Nepal. I’d like to suggest that while we have the world’s attention, start a boycott, make it public, get pledges, contact Whole Foods, get them to boycott Nepal products, also contact Pier One Imports and World Market. Finally, contact National Geographic Magazine…have them do an Expose on Animal Sacrifice in Nepal. We must bring down world shame on Nepal. Thank you!
First of all, as ANIMALS 24-7 pointed out in “Ignoring Thanksgiving massacre, HSUS president Wayne Pacelle denounces animal sacrifice in Nepal,” http://wp.me/p4pKmM-WF, more than 300 million Americans participated in killing and eating 46 million turkeys within the same time frame that a single small, isolated, remote village in Nepal killed 750 buffalo. Except for those few of us who are vegans or vegetarians, for Americans to respond to the Gadhi Mai festival by calling for a national boycott reeks of hypocrisy. Second, boycotting nations in protest against the deeds of just a very few almost always backfires. People who are boycotted for things they have not done, do not support, and often know little about tend to become resentful. Worse, tourism boycotts directed at people of other ethnicities support the charges of cultural isolationists who contend that the outside opponents of their cruel pursuits are ignorant bigots. Boycotts fail most often when directed against practices which are portrayed as aspects of local culture, mingled with the self-identify of the perpetrators and their communities. Local defense of cruel customs tends to increase proportional to the intensity of a perceived outside threat. The Gadhi Mai festival is economically unsustainable, is unpopular even within the Terai region of Nepal where it is practiced, and is of remarkably recent origin in current form, with no verifiable roots in local culture and history, despite the pretenses of the priests who promote it. See “The origin of the Gadhi Mai sacrifice,: http://www.animals24-7.org/2014/03/12/427/. It will not survive much longer––if activists work against it for what it is, instead of exaggerating the magnitude and significance of it to the point of turning it into a cultural icon that the Nepalese government feels compelled to defend, much as the Spanish government defends bullfighting. For further particulars about the self-defeating nature of national boycotts, see “Why boycotts cannot stop bullfights, pigeon shoots, or any culture-based cruelty,” http://wp.me/p4pKmM-hS.