From the latest issue of the students' magazine, The Loyolean

As we move into the New Year, we wish the outgoing batch the best of luck for their future. As you read your Loyolean don’t miss out on our latest inclusion to the LPC team elaborated upon in the Club Watch section. The new LPC team, full of energy has begun work on the next issue and is looking forward to a lot of contributions this time. We have decided to award a special gift to the best contribution in the Loyolean, starting from this issue. Check out the puzzles and have fun reading your very own magazine. Ciao.

Source: The Loyolean, Chp 6, Vol II, 2006

Check the Students Section for more articles from the issue.

Cruelty to animals

As I was checking my inbox the other day, I glanced upon one of those irritating mails which began with “$10 only, blah blah blah”. This one was advertising an “Exotic” Thai cook book and I clicked on the link out of curiosity. About to get out of the page, mainly due to my low level of technical expertise as a cook, I glanced on a recipe for “Shark Fin Soup”. A few hurried search strings and after ten minutes of downloading data, I was looking at how these industrious South East Asians procure the main ingredient, i.e. the shark fin. It turned out that once they harpoon or hook a shark, it’s pulled up aboard the ship and its fin is cut off with a knife and the still alive shark is thrown back into the sea, without its fin. The shark sinks to the bottom of the ocean and dies of suffocation. Just for a bowl of overpriced soup! If you think that’s a waste of an already endangered species, wait till you check out the barbaric Finnish fisheries. One of two countries (the other is Japan) to legalize whaling, sperm whales, Orcas and many other whales are dissected crudely on a whaler for a few bars of soap and some oil. Hunted nearly to extinction, the largest living creature, the blue whale is over 120 feet long. Despite its gigantic proportions, there’s nothing like an old fashioned harpoon to rip into vulnerable tissue to incarcerate these huge but gentle creatures.

Blubber is also used in certain ultra-expensive perfumes sold across Europe, illegally. Another accessory for the rich is Fur. For the uninitiated let me explain how fur is extracted from creatures such as minks, foxes, bears, dogs and cats. That’s right, even dogs and cats. 75% of the fur labeled ‘Mink’ in North America comes from China’s horrific Fur farms, where dogs and cats are mercilessly killed to obtain their fur. Animals are rounded up and stuffed into small and overstuffed cages and loaded on trucks headed for these infamous farms. On reaching the farm, these cages are dropped from the top of the truck onto the ground, shattering the legs of the animals when they hit the ground. The animals are kept in those cages for almost a week without food and water and then beaten with rods or choked with wires. These broken animals are then stripped of their fur, most of them alive, and the bloody body thrown into a heap of such bodies, some of them still blinking. If you are buying real fur there’s no way to tell whose skin you’re wearing or what pain that animal went through.

Cruelty to animals is nothing new. While walking on the streets of old Lucknow you might chance upon a dancing bear with its madari beating an old drum with children huddled around, cheering. What appears to be harmless fun is actually excruciating pain for the poor bear. Puzzled? Well you see when a madari buys an adolescent bear he punctures a hole through the nose of the hear and slips in a metal ring which is tied to a rope. Owing to the presence of the metal ring, the wound because of the puncture refuses to heal and when the madari yanks on the rope, the hear experiencing excruciating pain complies with whatever the madari wants it to do hence the dancing. Most bears don’t live beyond a few months of this treatment and the Indian sloth bear has joined the ever increasing endangered animals list.

Tigers for their fur, the one homed rhino faced with certain extinction with only 25 left for its horn, elephants for ivory, peacocks for their feathers, deers for their skin and for the amusement of the super rich are poached every year in ever shrinking forests. All of us contribute to these mindless killings, either directly or indirectly due to indifference and ignorance. Every effort counts in this losing battle and each individual can make a difference.