/asia

Cow Thefts on the Rise in India - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/asia/cow-thefts-on-the-rise-in-india.html

The police say they have increased patrols and set up roadblocks in an effort to stop the trafficking. In some cases, officers have infiltrated gangs in hopes of catching them in the act. But the brutal kidnappings continue, and the victims — scrawny cows, which are slowly losing their sacred status among some in India — are slaughtered and sold for meat and leather.

Cattle rustling, called “lifting” here, is a growing scourge in New Delhi, as increasingly affluent Indians develop a taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism. Criminals round up some of the roughly 40,000 cattle that wander the streets of this megacity and sell them to illegal slaughterhouses located in villages not far away.

Behind the cattle rustling is a profound shift in Indian society. Meat consumption — chicken, primarily — is becoming acceptable even among Hindus. India is now the world’s largest dairy producer, its largest cattle producer and its largest beef exporter, having surpassed Brazil last year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Much of that exported beef is from buffalo (India has half of the world’s buffalo population), which are not considered holy. But officials in Andhra Pradesh recently estimated that there are 3,100 illegal slaughterhouses in the state compared with just six licensed ones, and a recent newspaper investigation found that tens of thousands of cattle are sold annually for slaughter from a market in just one of that state’s 64 districts. Killing cows is illegal in much of India, and some states outlaw the possession of cow meat.

#viande #vache_sacrée #Inde #trafic