Animal welfare history in Madras/Chennai & why it matters to the world
Merritt Clifton posted: "History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai by Prashanth Krishna C.P.R. Publications c/o C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation, 1 Eldams Road, Alwarpet, Chennai 600 018, India Reviewed by Merritt Clifton Prashanth Krishna, author of His" Animals 24-7
History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai
by Prashanth Krishna
C.P.R. Publications
c/o C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation, 1 Eldams Road, Alwarpet, Chennai 600 018, India
Reviewed by Merritt Clifton
Prashanth Krishna, author of History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai, writes from the long shadows of his parents, 60-year Blue Cross of India president Chinny Krishna and renowned cultural anthropologist Nanditha Krishna, on a topic that few people will instantly recognize as significant, in a format––a doctoral dissertation––which seldom produces either easy or popular reading.
The purpose of a dissertation, after all, is to demonstrate depth of knowledge, rather than to entertain. A successful dissertation is accessed in libraries as a scholarly reference, not sold as a mass-market paperback and made into a film starring someone famous.
Prashanth Krishna pets a young lion at Lions' Rock sanctuary, operated by Four Paws in South Africa.
Impressive constellation
With that much acknowledged, History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai details hundreds of years of history of both enduring and increasing influence worldwide.
The city formerly called Madras and now known as Chennai has as strong a claim as any to being the historical birthplace of animal advocacy.
But even if one chooses to dismiss the cultural antecedents that eventually influenced British military personnel formerly stationed in India to introduce vegetarian communal living to the U.S. shortly after the American Revolution, and to found the Royal SPCA of Great Britain in 1824, Chennai in relatively recent times has produced an impressive constellation of animal advocacy institutions.
Roll call
Nor is the influence of Chennai diminished by noting that several of those institutions have subsequently been relocated to Delhi, the national capital of India, in recognition that they are of national and in some cases international importance.
Among those institutions, besides the Blue Cross of India, founded in 1959, are or have been the Animal Welfare Board of India, a branch of the Indian federal government, with no direct parallel in any other nation; the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations (FIAPO), providing a collective voice to perhaps 1,000 independent nonprofit animal advocacy organizations; the Indian national Animal Birth Control program, operating since 2002, modeled after the ABC program initiated by the Blue Cross of India in 1966; and the Committee for Control & Supervision of Experiments on Animals, also a branch of government, formerly overseen by the Animal Welfare Board of India.
Prashanth Krishna as a child played with dogs on the floor of his parents' and grandparents' homes while assemblies of adults discussed the affairs of those institutions.
Inevitably absorbing much humane history just from being there, Prashanth Krishna has more recently become an active participant himself, including pursuit of his Ph.D. to become better prepared for leadership, keenly aware of the traditions his work represents.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Mahavira & the Buddha
"Around the sixth century BCE," writes Prashanth Krishna, "two great religious leaders were born who spoke of compassion and kindness and abjured all killing, especially the sacrifice of animals, and took their teachings to the people in the local language: Mahavira the Jina (victor) and Gautama the Buddha (wise).
"Both emphasized the importance of Ahimsā or non-violence," also illustrated in "the legend of Neminatha, the Jain Tirthankara.
"His marriage had been arranged with Rajulakumari or Rajimati, the daughter of King Ugrasena of Dwaraka," Prashanth Krishna explains.
"But, when he saw animals fenced in, awaiting slaughter, and heard animal cries as they were being slaughtered for the marriage feast, he became distressed and unhappy, and refused to marry, renouncing his worldly life to become a monk."
"Buddhism and Jainism arose in India in opposition to animal sacrifice," Prashanth Krishna continues. "Subsequently, Hinduism evolved to encourage vegetarianism and even required Brahmins to become vegetarian.
"Both Mahavira (599-527 BCE) and the Buddha (563-483 BCE) taught compassion for all beings," Prashanth Krishna mentions, "but vegetarianism is mandatory for Jains.
"Said Mahavira, 'Live and let others live. Life is precious to all living beings."
(Beth Clifton collage)
The emperor Ashoka
The Buddhist emperor Ashoka (302-232 BCE), "left inscriptions on rocks and pillars all over India exhorting people to have compassion towards animals and banned the slaughter of cows and other animals," Prashanth Krishna continues.
"Ashoka's rock edicts declare that injuring living beings is not good, and no animal should be sacrificed for slaughter. He imposed a ban on the killing of 'all four-footed creatures that are neither useful nor edible,' and of certain animal species including several birds, fish and bulls; female goats, sheep and pigs who were nursing their young, as well as their young up to the age of six months; all fish; and stopped the castration of animals during the new moon and full moon phases.
"He abolished the royal hunt and restricted the slaughter of animals for food in the royal palace. He established several veterinary clinics and eliminated meat eating on many holidays.
"For the first time, and probably only time in history, a government – the Mauryan Empire of Ashoka - treated animals as equally deserving of protection as human beings."
Sacred Animals of India
Prashanth Krishna draws heavily upon his mother's opus Sacred Animals of India (2008) in explaining that, "By giving animals a sacred position, ancient Indians recognized the divinity in all creatures, who are subject to the same laws of karma, birth and rebirth," and protected their "ecology and economy, of which animals are an irreplaceable part, whether it was the snakes who controlled rats, or cows who provided milk, or the tigers and lions who ensured the health of the Indian forest."
Both Buddhism and Jainism originated far to the north, in Nepal, the largest of the three Himalayan nations, the others being Tibet and Bhutan, that belong to cultural India, but not to the modern Indian political entity.
Their teachings, however, including "The principles of compassion and justice towards animals," became "an essential part of Tamil literature and culture," Prashanth Krishna recounts.
Chennai is the historical hub of the Tamil-speaking region of eastern India, much of which is now part of Tamil Nadu state, of which Chennai is capital.
"Tamil literature is full of stories of compassion and ethical requirements of kindness towards animals," Prashanth Krishna states, citing prominent examples.
(Beth Clifton collage)
"Animals were an inevitable part of colonialism"
During the British colonial era, which began in 1608 but did not become British rule until 1858, "Animals were an inevitable part of colonialism," Prashanth Krishna observed.
"Animals, as beasts of burden, were essential for the management and movement of goods and resources, to build the railway and roads that were essential for carrying supplies for armies and for export to the United Kingdom.
"Colonialism was responsible for the large-scale clearing of forests and destruction of predators –– in fact, a price was paid for every predator killed –– in order that lands under agriculture could be expanded and revenue increased.
Akbar the Great
Understates Mogul influence
"Slaughterhouses were built by the British to provide meat for the British soldiers, officials and missionaries. The entire ethos of compassion collapsed under this onslaught," Prashanth Krishna argues, though a certain amount of blame might also be attributed to the overlapping epoch of Muslim rule of western India.
Both the British colonists and the Mogul rulers whose reigns preceded the British takeover were enthusiastic sport hunters, including Akbar the Great (1542-1605), the third Mogul emperor, despite Akbar having been influenced by Jainism to the point of becoming vegetarian.
Old bullock. (Help Animals India photo)
First SPCAs
British rule brought the formation of the first Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in India organized after the model of the Royal SPCA, as opposed to the temple-based sanctuaries for former working animals such as cows, bullocks, and elephants that had already existed perhaps for millennia.
Among the very first were the Calcutta SPCA, begun by the artist Colesworthy Grant in 1861; the Bombay SPCA, founded by textile entrepreneur Sir Dinshaw Manokjee Petit in 1874; and the Madras SPCA, founded by Frederick Gell, then the Anglican bishop of Madras, in 1877.
British-style legislation to protect animals came into effect here and there around India beginning in 1860, including in Madras (now Chennai), culminating in the passage of the first national Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act in 1890.
Rukmini Devi Arundale. (Beth Clifton collage)
Rukmini Devi Arundale
Lifelong Madras resident Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986) was the first major influence on the evolution of animal advocacy in India whom Prashanth Krishna met personally, albeit only as a child when she was advanced in years.
A major figure generally in the revival of positive Indian cultural traditions throughout the era in which India sought, and in 1947 obtained, independence from Britain, Rukmini Devi "crusaded against animal sacrifices, was a champion of vegetarianism and fearlessly pointed out the various cruelties to which animals were subjected to by Indians in the name of religion or profession," Prashanth Krishna summarizes.
Not surprisingly, recitations of the work of Rukmini Devi dominate the mid-section of History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai.
Jallikattu in Tamil Nadu. (Sundaram Perumal photo/Wikimedia Commons)
The Blue Cross of India
The latter third of History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai chiefly describes the many campaigns of the Blue Cross of India and allied organizations.
Among the most notable of those campaigns was a failed attempt in 1987-1990 to develop an injectable chemosterilant for dogs called Talsur, ancestral to many similar formulations tried later in the U.S. and South America, including Neutersol and Esterisol.
A longtime major focus trying to regulate the many animal use industries in India, including transportation by bullock cart, only recently superseded by use of motor vehicles in much of rural India.
Ongoing campaigns have sought to curtail abusive entertainments, ranging from western-style horse racing to a participant event popular in Tamil Nadu called jallikattu, in which cash prizes are tied between bulls' horns and mobs then compete to grab them. The outcome is more-or-less a cross between bull-running as conducted annually in Pamplona, Spain, and a mixed martial arts battle royal.
Nanditha & Chinny Krishna. (Facebook photo)
Jains vs. "Pasteur Institutes"
Probably a whole book could be written about the long conflict between Jain anti-vivisectionists and the British introduction of "Pasteur Institutes" to produce anti-rabies vaccines.
Prashanth Krishna quotes Gulal Chand, Secretary of the Antivivisection Society of Calcutta, who "wrote to the government about 'the disastrous failures which have constantly attended the Pasteur Institute at Paris and in England, and the most horrible cruelty involved therein of the painful experiments and the cultivation of rabies and inoculation is so much shocking to the hearts specially of the Jains who as well form a part of Her Majesty's most loyal and peaceful subjects."
The first "Pasteur Institute" in India, founded at Kasauli in 1900, evolved into the Central Research Institute in 1905, and almost 100 years later spun off the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence of today, which tracks the data on every disease found in India.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Rabies reached India when Brits brought fighting dogs
Additional "Pasteur Institutes" were begun at Coonoor, Tamil Nadu state, in 1907, Rangoon (now part of Myanmar) in 1916, Shillong in 1917, and Calcutta in 1924.
Britain was particularly eager to eradicate rabies from India, not only because rabies was a public health threat, but also because as an 1857 New York Times report described, rabies had apparently reached India with fighting dogs brought from Cyprus by British troops.
Alleges Prashanth Krishna, "The links between animals and scientific research were never studied. The research laboratories used massive animal resources, such as six thousand rabbits required annually to produce a single vaccine in one Pasteur institute."
(Beth Clifton collage)
Semple & Harvey
But this is a rather garbled description of the process by which Sir David Semple and Major William F. Harvey in 1904 developed the nerve tissue culture post-exposure anti-rabies vaccine used worldwide for more than 90 years before being superseded by vaccines cultivated in egg yolks.
The Semple vaccine, as it became known, was cultivated not in rabbits but in sheep, although rabbits were used in vaccine testing.
Each sheep produced enough antibodies to rabies to treat hundreds of potential rabies victims.
(Beth Clifton collage)
1911 survey
Put on the defensive by the Jain-led opposition to the anti-rabies vaccine, Semple and Harvey–– before putting the vaccine into mass production for use throughout India––in 1911 conducted a survey of the rabies caseload at government hospitals throughout what was then British India.
This included, as well as modern India, the present-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
Every estimate of human rabies deaths in India published between 1911 and 2003, and many published since, appear to have been derived by multiplying the Semple and Harvey findings by the rate of human population increase since the 1911 Semple and Harvey survey was done, disregarding that the Semple and Harvey study preceded the widespread introduction of post-exposure rabies vaccination.
Luke Gamble, VMD, and his Mission Rabies team have since 2013 been vaccinating rabies out of existence in much of India. (Mission Rabies photo)
Catastrophic consequences
The resulting gross over-estimates of human rabies deaths have had catastrophic consequences both for successful rabies control and for humane dog population control via Animal Birth Control.
Reality is that while the annual Indian human death toll from rabies has often been said to be as high as 60,000, the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence since 2003 has found an actual toll ranging from a high of 361 in 2006 to a low of 55 in 2021.
The publishing reception for History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai.
How Jains came to accept Animal Birth Control
Prashanth Krishna, having earlier extensively cited my own Chronology of Humane Progress (2003, 2013), toward the end of History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras/Chennai honors me by including in full a brief history of the Blue Cross of India that I wrote shortly after my first visit to India in 1997.
That report mentioned that Jains now generally endorse the Animal Birth Control programs pioneered by Chinny Krishna at the Blue Cross of India, but this was not the case at first.
Initially the Jain leaders of Chennai and elsewhere considered neutering dogs to be wrongly interfering in the life process.
That changed after Chinny Krishna showed an influential Jain how 16,000 dogs a year were electrocuted at the Chennai pound.
Prashanth Krishna in a play.
How electrocuting dogs began & ended
The Royal SPCA of Great Britain had experimented with electrocuting animals from approximately 1885 until about 1928, before concluding that it could never be considered acceptably humane by British standards.
The RSPCA then exported the six Royal SPCA electrocution machines to India during a rabies panic. Dogs were legally electrocuted in India until the last of these machines known to remain in India were dismantled in 1997 and 1998, respectively.
Shaken by witnessing the electrocutions, the Jain began asking Jain monks to tell people about Animal Birth Control wherever their pilgrimages took them.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
They soon spread the word throughout India, leading eventually to the introduction of Animal Birth Control as official policy first in Chennai, and throughout India seven years later.
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