But a buffalo is simply a cow in another form. It gives the same milk and suffers the same cruelties. There are very few cows left in India, so most milk and ghee comes from buffaloes.

Just as holy

If the cow is to be protected because it is a holy animal, is the buffalo no less sacred? It is as old as the cow in our literature. Known as mahisha in Sanskrit, it is associated with Yama, the Hindu god of death, who rides a male buffalo, and also Dharma, the lord of justice. Many old Indian tribes considered the buffalo sacred and the Todas, an ancient tribe of the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu in South India, still do. The buffalo is the totem of the Maria Gonds, who live along the Indravati river in Bastar district of central India.

India is no longer dependent on the cow. For 5,000 years, we have used the buffalo equally or more. The bulls are all dead in the illegal slaughterhouses. The bullocks have disappeared along with them. It is the buffalo that provides draft power to the farmer. It is the buffalo that tills the field and carries the produce to the market. It is the buffalo that provides milk. And alas, it is the buffalo that is the main victim of slaughterhouses. Those terrible, so-called weekly, ‘farmer’s markets’ that have proliferated in every district and only cater to butchers are full of these sad creatures. The Indian government has no policy on buffaloes despite their merits.

Killed for meat

Oxen are the mainstay of the Indian agricultural system. Small, fast oxen drag wooden ploughs through late-spring fields when monsoons have dampened the dry, cracked earth. After harvest, the oxen break the grain from the stalk by stomping through mounds of cut wheat and rice. For rice cultivation in irrigated fields, the male water buffalo is preferred. A single male buffalo can comfortably lug 25 quintals over 10 to 15 km, whereas cattle bullocks cannot manage beyond 15 quintals.

Since each of the 70 million farms in India requires a draft team, it follows that Indian peasants should use 140 million animals in the fields. But there is huge shortage of oxen and male water buffaloes in the subcontinent. Why?

Today, India is the world’s largest beef exporter with over 1.80 million tonnes going out legally and another million tonne going illegally to Bangladesh. How are they killed? Many of them are wounded during transportation and tossed off the trucks. They are hacked to death as they lie prone and struggle. Buffalo meat is the cheapest in the world so it is imported by ‘price sensitive’ importers such as Vietnam, Africa, Middle East and Southeast Asia. It is cheap because we break every rule possible in killing these beautiful animals. Many of them have foot and mouth disease, most of them are crippled and some are near dead by the time they are killed and many of their wounds are gangrenous. There are no safeguards to prevent the mingling of buffalo meat with the meat from illegally slaughtered calves and bullocks from dairy cows.

Efficient animals

Buffaloes are more efficient converters of low-quality feeds or coarse fodder. This is important in the Indian context, where livestock survive largely on crop residues—wheat and paddy straw, sugarcane tops, or the cake remaining after extraction of oil from groundnut, copra, and mustard-seed—and not many farmers can afford costly compound concentrate feeds, or set aside land for intensive forage cultivation. Buffaloes are not very finicky about quality and taste, unlike cows that require their straw to be finely bruised and laced with jaggery or flour. They are better at converting poor-quality roughage into milk.

Buffalo milk has more calories than cow milk (100 calories are derived from 100g of buffalo milk while 70 calories from 100g of cow milk). Buffalo milk contains less cholesterol (0.65 mg/g) than cow milk (3.14 mg/g). It has about 11.42 percent higher protein than cow milk. Buffalo milk is also superior to cow milk in terms of calcium, iron and phosphorus which are higher by 92 per cent, 37.7 percent and 118 per cent respectively than in cow milk. It has more Vitamin A and a lower water content and higher fat content. Buffalo milk is much whiter than cow milk.

The whey proteins of buffalo milk are more resistant to heat denaturation as compared to cow milk proteins. Dried milk products prepared from buffalo milk retain higher levels of un-denatured proteins. It makes better cheese. The presence of higher levels of bioprotective factors also render buffalo milk more suitable for health reasons than cow milk. It is more easily digested. Buffalo milk yogurt is naturally thick set and does not require milk proteins or gelling agents as lesser milks do.

So learn from the Todas, who believe in superior godlike beings, the two most important being On and Teikirzi. On created the buffaloes and the Todas in that order. In the Toda tradition, buffaloes are credited with almost human intelligence. On created 1,600 buffaloes, behind the last buffalo came man, the first Toda.

Toda religion is based on the buffaloes and their milk. Central to Toda religion are the dairies, which are temples. These are not simply places where gods reside, but are themselves divine. A small scar on a boy’s wrist, elbow, or under the shoulder shows that he has the status for milking buffalo and is a dairyman-priest.

 To join the animal welfare movement contact [email protected], www.peopleforanimalsindia.org