ANIMAL WELFARE IN ISLAM

Not too long ago, I had the privilege of talking to an eminent Islamic scholar, who wishes to remain unnamed. Our conversation covered a wide range of topics. The one closest to his heart, however, was the treatment of animalkind according to the tenets of Islam.“Islam was one of the earliest faiths to care about the rights of animals,” he waxed eloquent. ‘In general, kindness to animals has been promised by reward in the life hereafter’. We find this sentiment in line 178....................................."

WHY ANIMAL RIGHTS

Many of you grew up eating meat and chicken, wearing leather and fur, and going to circuses and zoos. Many of you have kept beautiful birds in cages. Many of you wear silk, go have a chicken burger and fished. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. Why? Because many don’t think that animals also have rights.

Why this question asked:

Why should animals have rights?The first and foremost thing that every human being should understand is that they don’t own this earth. He made the earth in his own way by buildings and roads for his use but that doesn’t mean that the land they build upon is theirs. What about the animals living over there?

This earth belongs to everyone which includes all animals.Like humans, animals also have a right to live. Because, they are the same as us, just with a lower brain capacity than humans; preventing them from rational thinking and ruling this earth!!! But they have a complete sensory nervous system allowing them to be aware and communicative. They feel pain, pleasure, fear, frustration, loneliness, and motherly love. Should the more intelligent humans have rights and the less intelligent humans be denied rights? If that is not so, then why are animals denied their rights?

Animals have certain rights. For instance, a dog most certainly would not like having pain inflicted on him unnecessarily. We are, therefore, obliged to take that interest into consideration and to respect the dog’s right not to have pain unnecessarily inflicted upon him.Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the reforming utilitarian school of moral philosophy, stated that when deciding on a being’s rights, “The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’ ”.

Animals surely deserve to live their lives free from suffering and exploitation."Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight." -Rev. Dr Andrew Linzey 1952What we are taught by parents and teachers is to be good citizens, nice, kind, helpful to others. Well, now the famous quote goes as follows:"

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."Only after understanding that animals too have rights to live their lives free from suffering and pain done by humans, then only we can understand the pain given to animals and join hands to stop this merciless torture.

TRUTH ABOUT BANGLORE INCIDENT

The truth abt the bangalore massacre..hey guys a lot of ppl dnt know abt the truth what happened in bangalore be4 the dogs were killed and y.its goes this way.. the small gal was playing with the pups..the pups mother cums and starts growling as to protect her pups. the gal get frightened may be and runs with one of the pups in her hand...the mother dogs barks and chases the gal to get her pup..ppl think the dog is biting the gal and start stoning the dog..many huge stones are thrown at the dog.. by misatke one or 2 two stones hit the gal too.. on the head.. thus the gal dies of brain heamorrage.. thats what is also there in the post mortem report.. the ppl suppress this truth..ministers too may be helping to supress.. y ??? god knws may be 4 the vote bank..this is not a made up story.. its the story of the same gal who was said to be killed in bangalore

WILL U ALL ACCEPT THIS CRUELTY

http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/dog.html

AN ANIMAL LOVER SHALINI SAID

I think the primary thing we forget in our paranoia is that we HAVE been killing dogs for decades, and it has been all in vain! I visited BEML layout the day after the terrible incident took place, because I wanted to see the situation for myself this time instead of being led by one-sided media reports, and before the corporation stepped in to kill all the dogs there. We also tried to document on film as much as we could, but we have not looked at it to compile it yet. The situation there was indeed terrible, the entire area is nothing but a dumping ground! On all sides of the residential area, just a few feet away from the apartments are vast stretches of garbage and meat scraps. All the neighboruing areas apparently dumb their garbage there, which was veyr believable. The residential area is a short distance away from what seemed to be the marketplace centre of the layout - where there are a couple of meat shops as well as many shops and the medical centre. The dogs around the shops were the first we encountered, and they seemed very fearful but docile. We spoke to a some slum dwellers, who live a stone's throw away from the market - they take care of one (again, fearful) dog. They said that the dog wouldn't bite anyone, but those near the residential area had gone 'bad'. Even if they stepped into that area, they'd get bitten. The state of the other people in the market area was just too sad. We saw a little boy standing with an old construction worker, with a sort of whip (long stick with a rope attached) - both whipping any dog they saw, and all those who were just peacefully lying around. This seemed to be a form of amusement - both would laugh when the dog jumped up and ran away in pain. We spoke to them, the boy shyly grinned and said he hit them for no reason, and only grinned further at any sort of 'how would you feel if I did that to you?' The old man at first denied hitting a dog, but later said the owner of the shop had asked them to do it. When we attempted to speak to the owner, he pretended he knew neither english nor hindi nor kannada! When human beings constantly hurt dogs, isn't it only natural for them to grow scared and attack? At the residential area, we spoke to a few lady residents, who were understandably very upset and scared. They told us there had been another incident almost as bad just a little while back, where the young child fortunately survived. They had complained to BEML and to BMP, but to no avail. We also spoke to someone at the medical centre, who told us that there hadn't been too many bite cases, and when there were it was mostly adults coming in for a scratch or something. These two severe cases were an exception. There had also never been a case of rabies in the area. One of the women sent her son to show us around. He took us to an exansive overgrown garbage dumping field right opposite the apartments, where he said Manjunath had been hiding behind a bush while playing hide and seek. My heart sank when I saw the area. There are bushes everywhere, and a man standing there gave us a perhaps exaggerated figure of 80-100 dogs that must live in that expanse. There is no way even a small proportion of those dogs could be caught for any purpose unless the field is cleared entirely, and that would be a HUGE task! Stationed around the field were men hired to beat up viciously any stray dog they spotted. They had been set to the task a month ago, and after the recent incident, even more young boys had voluntarily joined. We saw and hopefully got on film one of these beatings, and it was terrible! This was a perhaps 3 or 4 month old PUPPY - and the men would not let it escape, they chased it beating it until it managed to escape somehow. I couldn't bear looking at it, and the SADDEST thing was the reaction of the young boy with us! I would not have let ANY child see such an act of violence and cruelty, but this boy was completely insensitive, and seemed quite amused with everything. After that, we despondently moved back to the car, while the boy told us stories about how you could open manjunath's head like a cap (!), and how if you put any water into his mouth it would come out through the holes in his throat. It seems a terrible terrible cycle! It was so clear to us and many of the residents also seemed to understand that besides being an impossible task, even if you did kill all the dogs there, dogs from surrounding areas would move in to feed on the garbage, within NO time. reproduction betweeen them would be unrestricted, survival rates would be very good because of all the food and shelter, and because there would be no established territory for them, fights would increase! Meanwhile, people grow scared of the dogs, treat them inhumanely, and instill in the dogs a fear and viciousness towards human beings! It becomes a war where it is the dogs versus people. Why need it be that way? Dogs are not naturally vicious, no animal attacks for no reason, and human beings are not what dogs consider food! It is this atmosphere of hostility that seems to cause most problems. And I've been hearing so much of 'in the US this doens't happen, why do we allow it to happen?'. This sort of argument is unbelievable- conditions are completely completely different in developed countries! They have no open garbage dump sites, there is no way we can have a stray dog free bangalore with all the garbage lying around - it is utterly impossible! What we must do is find better systems of garbage management, CONTROL the numbers of stray dogs by sterilization, control rabies by vaccination, and remove this hostile fear from both dogs and people by educating people to treat dogs better. I am glad commissioner Jairaj and the BMP are simply intensifying the sterilization drive, and isolating ferocious dogs for observation, and NOT killing mercilessly all the lovely, affectionate dogs of the city. I do hope no killing takes place, because it is clear to me that it will only worsen the situation!

STRAYED

A "DOGS" CITY'S MASTER PLAN

Stray dogs nowadays have a new word to represent them, ’MENACE’. People may be divided into two groups, both emotionally activated, one driven by love and affection, the other by hate and repulsion. But for both types, and especially for those who are emotionally unattached to animals, there is a logical discourse & paradigm that may be looked at keeping all emotional arguments aside, to solve the newly named problem called – THE DOG MENACE. To start with, if we go back in human history, through various civilizations which succeeded each other, there has never been a period when the entire human population ceased to exist altogether in an area or region, unless guided by nature’s forces or inaccessible physical boundaries. For example, if someone were to eliminate the population of humans in a city, as was attempted in Japan during the World War 2, can the entire population be destroyed completely and for ever? No! Of course it can not be!
Any species is it human or animal cannot be forced out of existence altogether, no matter however large the scale of destruction is; and ANYTHING that MOVES and that has the intelligence even to the IQ level of a mosquito will not remain stationed in one place. Like we humans do, they will naturally move towards a better habitat and a territory of their own
Hence, the first inference that can be drawn is that NO SPECIES CAN BE PREVENTED FROM EXISTING AND NO LIVING CAN BE PREVENTED FROM MOVING AND INHABITATING EMPTY AND MORE COMFORTABLE AREAS, unless physical boundaries are made, or in cases of dogs, are made to understand signboards of “no entry”.
So the problem and solution that may lie is not with the existence of dogs but with the over population of any species. This is similar to the problem that metropolitan cities are facing, where the population of humans becomes alarmingly more as compared to the resources and space available. To solve human over population problem do we kill humans? No we don’t!! We control human population by PLANNING A CITY properly. Being an architect and a planner I can call it in technical terms the DENSITY OF LANDUSES of an area or city. In planning a city we decide how many people must be allowed to live in a square km of area on an average and what infrastructure can be provided to sustain the population planned. That also does not mean that we literally kill the rest or throw out the people who come thereafter. On the other hand, we implement the theoretical concept by a practical INDIRECT approach & solution, like controlling the influx of people by laws & methods of not allowing people to build on roads, pavements, common areas, etc. Hence, the human over population can be controlled by proper planning of the City; by an instrument we call the MASTER PLAN. And if the master plan fails, the human city faces havoc too. It is but natural. We don’t blame the humans in that case, we blame the planning.
Similarly in case of animals, dogs in particular, we cannot kill or keep throwing them out of localities because, as earlier concluded, this is not possible to achieve. So, as we plan our cities we have to solve the dog problem in a similar way, i.e. by deciding how many dogs live in a locality, how their multiplication is controlled and how dogs from outside the locality are prevented from entering the locality, i.e. a Density plan for them as well and its implementation strategy.
This can be achieved easily, as dogs are by nature territorial and do not allow other dogs to enter their “home or local habitat”, i.e. if we are able to provide the community dogs with all the ingredients of a “home or habitat” in its correct plan and proportions. This means two things. Firstly, making them comfortable in the area by feeding them properly, taking care of their medical needs and not providing them with garbage dumps where they can hunt for more food. By feeding them properly we can control their behaviour and can make them our guards and can in a way domesticate them. They would readily adjust themselves to the people of the locality and would accept them as their masters. Whereas if they feed on their own on garbage they need not look upon us for survival and will by nature form herds to protect their garbage dumps against anybody that threatens it, which is when we face problems like it happened in Bangalore or Hyderabad. It is highly logical that the way to a dogs mind and heart is through its stomach. If we can control that, we can make a dog do anything for us, anything at all. There are innumerable examples of that all over the world. And thereafter, to control the numbers increasing manifold, we implement the Animal Birth Control Program.
Thus the second inference that can be drawn is— THE PROBLEM OF STRAY DOGS CAN BE PERMANANTLY SOLVED by " ABC (Animal Birth Control) program along with adoption & providing a well PLANNED HABITAT for them, by domesticating them, so they guard and coexists with us rather than cause harm to us. Dogs can themselves Control the DENSITY & INFLUX of more dogs in a locality, thereafter. "
Within this solution an important practice has to be adopted in the ABC Program .The program will have to be run in a city in the same localities time and again, at least twice or thrice, because there is always a re-mixing of dogs between localities up to 20-30%, since they are not so hostile to share space with fellow dogs that may add in small numbers. So to ensure that no dog is left unvaccinated and unneutered, a cycle of ABC Program has to be created. Also, since the average life span of a dog is between 8-10 years, the time lag between cycles of implementation of the program become substantially wide thus making implementation very easy and effective .The same is not the case with killing because when dogs are killed in mass, dogs from other nearby areas migrate to this “dog free vacuum” within days and the situation becomes what it previously had been. Killing thus is like going round in a circle which has no finishing point, and till the day a device to kill all dogs simultaneously throughout the world is invented, like a deadly sound wave, killing will remain no solution to the problem. It will only aggravate the problem.
But, we can not forget the fact that, ABC Program in itself has been flawless except for one reason — wrong or inefficient implementation of the program. There are two practices which lead to the failure of the program. Firstly the neutered dogs being rehabilitated and left back in new areas i.e. not in the areas from where they were picked up for ABC Program. This leads to an adhoc implementation of the program, whose aim is to cover each locality systematically and not to carry the program in a haphazard way. Hence rehabilitation in the same area is very important. The second reason for the failure of the program lies with the practice of conducting the operation of neutering in shelters which are home to many diseased dogs. The healthy neutered dogs catch infection in these shelters and thus the Post Operative Survival Rate comes out to be highly low. The localities left vacant after the demise of these healthy dogs are occupied by dogs which may be diseased and unneutered, which is again the point from where it all started. Hence, an inefficient ABC program is as good as increasing numbers by mass killing and may result in more dogs in that locality.
Thus to make the ABC Program flawless, separate facilities need to be constructed for these operations and the dogs have to be rehabilitated in their respective original localities at all costs. Such a flawless ABC Program will effectively help control the dog population. Also a planned favorable habitat for the survival of the existing dogs will end the hostility these dogs feel to their existence. They would easily coexist with humans eliminating threat of any kind to the latter from their species.........................