Luxuries

Luxuries
by Miriam Murphy, (Teacher)

They say “never work with animals or children” but, to be honest, if I didn’t do this I most likely would be working with some form of four-legged friend. As a result, walking through the many mud-hut villages here is a joy to me, not only because I’m a country girl at heart who loves the fresh air and self-sufficiency of it all, but also because there are animals everywhere. From the sacred cow to the scattered chickens and ducks, the posturing cockerel, the sheep-as stupid here as anywhere-the many dogs and everyone’s favourite, the goats, particularly the kids, one is surrounded.
We “ooh” and “aah”, fawning over the cuter ones and giving a wide berth to the buffalo, attempting to pat their heads and pick them up, while their Indian owners look on amused. You see, I came to a rather obvious realisation last Tuesday on the way home from work.
Avijit, our main man and minder, had explained to me that morning, as we walked the 12km to site, that cows and buffalo are both sacred but buffalo are used for agricultural work. Due to a strike that day we had no 4-wheeled transport and so we decided that a buffalo-cart ride home would be a novel addition to our stock of experiences which would also save our concrete-mixing, work-weary limbs the 12km walk home.
I was, naturally, very excited at the prospect of this rambling adventure, and in this was most naive and idealistic. I had not bargained for the amount of switches and sticks it would take to keep the two buffalo on track all the way home, and while I could see that they were not suffering undue hurt, I couldn’t help but flinch each time our driver whipped them back in line.
And then I realised that in my Western world, where animals become members of the family and millions of euro, dollars or whatever are spent every year on pet accessories, it is easy to be appalled by someone actually using a domesticated, agricultural animal for the purpose it was intended. Once again, it is not a case of black or white-we can pamper our animals and eat them too. These people do not have that luxury.