Message #10: Cows!

(Message sent Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:56:10 -0700)

Can someone explain to me how the cows work in India? What I mean is, everywhere you go from small village to major city cows roam the streets, and lots of them too, wandering about, searching through the piles of trash for food. My question is, who owns them? Are they owned communally? Does this mean that whenever you want milk you find a random nearby cow and set to work? Or if each cow is owned by a person, how on earth do the owners know where there cows are, as they wander the streets at will? Or are they actually feral? And not just cows either. I was walking down a busy street and a foal walked past, apparently ownerless. I thought to myself, "Of course there's a horse walking down the street - why wouldn't there be?" It's all very strange.

And if you are wondering whether putting cows and cars together is such a good idea, indeed it sometimes doesn't work out so well. On the drive from Agra to Jaipur I saw two calves and an ENTIRE COW as roadkill. (Well, mostly entire anyway.) People just swerved around this big bloated mound of flesh in the middle of the road with one leg sticking up, and continued on their way.

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