Put out to grass: When animals are allowed to grow old

Isa Leshko’s portraits of ageing animals are a tribute to creatures too often dismissed as mere livestock – and a poignant reminder of our own mortality

When I began this project, my galleries weren’t sure people would want to buy the prints, because the pictures were too sad,” says the American photographer Isa Leshko. “So I put a film about the work online. Immediately I was flooded by emails with stories about ageing parents or pets, and when I showed the pictures at some exhibitions, visitors would come up to me in tears. I wasn’t prepared for that at all,” she says, “but I think it’s difficult to talk about the people and animals that we love growing old and dying, and the portraits give people a licence to express grief for someone.”

Leshko’s photographs, collected in her book Allowed To Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries, are of old and often rather weather-beaten farm animals. You need a bit of a nudge before you see what’s unusual about them – ie they are old, whereas most farm animals are dispatched to the abattoir in their youth (and in many cases in their infancy).

Forest, aged 16, was rescued from planned extermination along with her herd on Santa Cruz island off the Californian coast. Photograph: © Isa Leshko

The subjects have mostly been rescued from slaughterhouses or farms after the authorities have intervened in cases of cruelty, and taken to live on one of the animal sanctuaries scattered across the US. A few, like the 28-year-old Appaloosa horse Buddy, have been donated when owners became unable to care for them – in Buddy’s case, painful iritis meant he had to have his eyes removed, and he needed expert care to help him get used to his blindness.

Having grown up in an urban, working-class Italian-American family, Leshko began her project in 2008 after encountering a brother-in-law’s old horse, Petey, in her native New Jersey. She was a professional photographer by then, and felt drawn to photograph the horse without knowing why. Later, she came to think that it was a way of making herself confront her own fears of getting old and dying, prompted by her mother becoming seriously ill.

This could've been as dry as a rooster’s dust bath, but she describes their personalities like a post-pastoral EB White

An unnamed rooster, age unknown, rescued from a factory farm. Photograph: © Isa Leshko

As she visited more sanctuaries, however, Leshko developed her campaigning edge. Already a vegetarian, she became vegan after meeting Valentino, a 19-year-old bull who, as a calf, had been rescued from a dairy farm which would most likely have sold him for veal or beef. “As I met more animals,” she says, speaking on the phone from her home in New England, “it became important to me that I advocated on behalf of the ones that were not lucky enough to have been rescued. Animal products may be ubiquitous, but farm animals themselves are fairly invisible, and I’m hoping people who read the book might stop to consider these animals’ lives and recognise that they’re individuals, not commodities; that they are sentient, and have unique personalities and emotions.”

Of course, for non-vegetarians who are not unduly fussed about the plight of modern livestock, this could all have been worthily depressing and as dry as a rooster’s dust bath. It isn’t, though, because Leshko puts herself into the book, and describes the animals’ personalities like a sort of grownup, post-pastoral EB White.

This is partly the story of a woman who starts out not knowing how to open and close a farm gate, and ends up learning how to put animals at ease so she can photograph them in close-up (approach them at eye level; lie in the hay with them for as long as it takes; don’t take your bag into the pen, because they’ll eat it).

Abe, a 21-year-old Alpine goat, was given to a sanctuary after his guardian entered an assisted living facility. Photograph: © Isa Leshko

It’s also about characters like friendly Melvin the Angora goat, and Babs the impossibly stoic, shaggy donkey, who are described in the text with an empathy at times reminiscent of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.

Making the text personal makes the book feel warm and open rather than preachy, which seems the right way to go if you really want to “start a conversation”, as Leshko does.

I grew up on a little farm that had cows, chickens and pigs, and I always felt that neither vegetarians nor hardcore carnivores understood the reality of our relationship with animals. It is perfectly true that livestock farmers can routinely send hundreds of young creatures to their deaths without much sense of them as individual living creatures. But it’s also true that many of them recognise, appreciate and enjoy the characters of the breeding stock, who are around for years.

My mum and dad usually had three or four old pigs they kept back as pets, though they never referred to them as that. Leshko’s picture of Teresa the pig, rescued from a truck in Washington DC in 1998, reminds me of our old boar, Champion, who died a natural death after being allowed to retire into a strawy corner. My dad used to go to scratch his back and talk to him after finishing work some nights.

Of course, keeping back a few pigs didn’t make us “humane” – certainly not from the point of view of the ones who didn’t get a reprieve – but it did mean our capacity for compassion was selective rather than nonexistent.

Buddy, an Appaloosa horse aged 28, went to a sanctuary after losing his sight. He suffered from panic attacks which took months of training to overcome. His eyes were eventually removed to resolve painful iritis. Photograph: © Isa Leshko

This is what a lot of farm folk mean when they say animal advocates “don’t understand” farming (“How can they call us heartless… look at how I sat up all night with Daisy!”). Leshko and I have a chat about it – I don’t know if it gets us anywhere, really (“But to me, it sounds like me saying to one of my cats, ‘You’re off to the slaughterhouse’ and to the other one ‘You can stay’!”), but she does make me think of so many farm stories, like Babe or Charlotte’s Web, that feature wily old animals and escapees as the heroes.

Leshko is beginning a new project in which she’ll document the moment of animals’ birth. It will be more challenging than the last one, because “it means being on call so I can be there at the moment it happens”, but she’s an old hand now, with a penchant for having turkeys and chickens sit in her lap.

Violet, a pot-bellied pig aged 12, was born with partially paralysed hind legs. She was given to a sanctuary to care for her special needs. Photograph: © Isa Leshko

Most of the animals in Allowed to Grow Old are dead now – some died a few days after she photographed them, which she found hard. She talks about her friendships with them in exactly the same way as she talks about her human relationships, and looks back on these animals as “some of the lucky ones”, living on in portraits that, she says, remind her “that old age is a blessing, not a curse.”

Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries by Isa Leshko is published by University of Chicago Press on 5 April (£30).

(Source: The Guardian)

Confessions of a slaughterhouse worker

About 100 million animals are killed for meat in the UK every month - but very little is heard about the people doing the killing. Here, one former abattoir worker describes her job, and the effect it had on her mental health.

Warning: Some readers may find this story disturbing

When I was a child I dreamed of becoming a vet. I imagined myself playing with mischievous puppies, calming down frightened kittens, and - as I was a countryside kid - performing check-ups on the local farm animals if they felt under the weather.

It was a pretty idyllic life that I dreamt up for myself - but it's not quite how things worked out. Instead, I ended up working in a slaughterhouse.

I was there for six years and, far from spending my days making poorly cows feel better, I was in charge of ensuring about 250 of them were killed every day.

Whether they eat meat or not, most people in the UK have never been inside an abattoir - and for good reason. They are filthy, dirty places. There's animal faeces on the floor, you see and smell the guts, and the walls are covered in blood.

And the smell... It hits you like a wall when you first enter, and then hangs thick in the air around you. The odour of dying animals surrounds you like a vapour.

Why would anybody choose to visit, let alone work in a place like this?

For me, it was because I'd already spent a couple of decades working in the food industry - in ready-meal factories and the like. So when I got an offer from an abattoir to be a quality control manager, working directly with the slaughtermen, it felt like a fairly innocuous job move. I was in my 40s at the time.

On my first day, they gave me a tour of the premises, explained how everything worked and, most importantly, asked me pointedly and repeatedly if I was OK. It was quite common for people to faint during the tour, they explained, and the physical safety of visitors and new starters was very important to them. I was OK, I think. I felt sick, but I thought I'd get used to it.

Soon, though, I realised there was no point pretending that it was just another job. I'm sure not all abattoirs are the same but mine was a brutal, dangerous place to work. There were countless occasions when, despite following all of the procedures for stunning, slaughterers would get kicked by a massive, spasming cow as they hoisted it up to the machine for slaughter. Similarly, cows being brought in would get scared and panic, which was pretty terrifying for all of us too. You'll know if you've ever stood next to one that they are huge animals.

Personally, I didn't suffer physical injuries, but the place affected my mind.

As I spent day after day in that large, windowless box, my chest felt increasingly heavy and a grey fog descended over me. At night, my mind would taunt me with nightmares, replaying some of the horrors I'd witnessed throughout the day.

One skill that you master while working at an abattoir is disassociation. You learn to become numb to death and to suffering. Instead of thinking about cows as entire beings, you separate them into their saleable, edible body parts. It doesn't just make the job easier - it's necessary for survival.

There are things, though, that have the power to shatter the numbness. For me, it was the heads.

At the end of the slaughter line there was a huge skip, and it was filled with hundreds of cows' heads. Each one of them had been flayed, with all of the saleable flesh removed. But one thing was still attached - their eyeballs.

Whenever I walked past that skip, I couldn't help but feel like I had hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me. Some of them were accusing, knowing that I'd participated in their deaths. Others seemed to be pleading, as if there were some way I could go back in time and save them. It was disgusting, terrifying and heart-breaking, all at the same time. It made me feel guilty. The first time I saw those heads, it took all of my strength not to vomit.

I know things like this bothered the other workers, too. I'll never forget the day, after I'd been at the abattoir for a few months, when one of the lads cut into a freshly killed cow to gut her - and out fell the foetus of a calf. She was pregnant. He immediately started shouting and throwing his arms about.

I took him into a meeting room to calm him down - and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes.

Even worse than pregnant cows, though, were the young calves we sometimes had to kill.

A physically demanding role

On its website, the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) says the UK meat industry has some of the highest standards of hygiene and welfare in the world.

Many of its members, it says, "are at the forefront of abattoir design with facilities designed to house the animals and help them move around the site with ease and without any pain, distress or suffering".

Meat processing in the UK employs about 75,000 people of whom approximately 69% are from other European Union member states, the BMPA notes.

"The barrier to British people taking up roles in meat processing is an unwillingness to work in what is perceived to be a challenging environment," it says. "Most people, while they eat meat, find it difficult to work in its production partly because of the obvious aversion to the slaughter process but also because it is a physically demanding role."

At the height of the BSE and bovine tuberculosis crises in the 1990s, whole herds of animals had to be slaughtered. I worked at the slaughterhouse after 2010, so well after the BSE crisis, but if an animal tested positive for TB or BSE they would still bring the entire herd in to be culled - bulls, heifers and calves. I remember one day in particular, when I'd been there for about a year or so, when we had to slaughter five calves at the same time.

We tried to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so small and bony that they could easily skip out and trot around, slightly wobbly on their newly born legs. They sniffed us, like puppies, because they were young and curious. Some of the boys and I stroked them, and they suckled our fingers.

When the time came to kill them, it was tough, both emotionally and physically. Slaughterhouses are designed for slaughtering really large animals, so the stun boxes are normally just about the right size to hold a cow that weighs about a tonne. When we put the first calf in, it only came about a quarter of a way up the box, if that. We put all five calves in at once. Then we killed them.

Afterwards, looking at the dead animals on the ground, the slaughterers were visibly upset.

I rarely saw them so vulnerable. Emotions in the abattoir tended to be bottled up. Nobody talked about their feelings; there was an overwhelming sense that you weren't allowed to show weakness. Plus, there were a lot of workers who wouldn't have been able to talk about their feelings to the rest of us even if they'd wanted to. Many were migrant workers, predominantly from Eastern Europe, whose English wasn't good enough for them to seek help if they were struggling.

A lot of the men I was working with were also moonlighting elsewhere - they'd finish their 10 or 11 hours at the abattoir before going on to another job - and exhaustion often took its toll. Some developed alcohol problems, often coming into work smelling strongly of drink. Others became addicted to energy drinks, and more than one had a heart attack. These drinks were then removed from the abattoir vending machines, but people would still bring them in from home and drink them secretly in their cars.

'I'm an animal lover'

A slaughterman at Tideford abbattoir, described his approach to his work, for The Food Chain on the BBC World Service:

"Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something. Just be professional, do it, then switch off - and then, when we've finished work, go home and be a normal person. It's not for everybody. I know a couple of butchers that would not walk inside this abattoir; the thought of taking something's life, they find that difficult to accept, or witness."

Abattoir work has been linked to multiple mental health problems - one researcher uses the term "Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Syndrome" to refer to symptoms of PTSD suffered by slaughterhouse workers. I personally suffered from depression, a condition exacerbated by the long hours, the relentless work, and being surrounded by death. After a while, I started feeling suicidal.

It's unclear whether slaughterhouse work causes these problems, or whether the job attracts people with pre-existing conditions. But either way, it's an incredibly isolating job, and it's hard to seek help. When I'd tell people what I did for work, I'd either be met with absolute revulsion, or a curious, jokey fascination. Either way, I could never open up to people about the effect it was having on me. Instead I sometimes joked along with them, telling gory tales about skinning a cow or handling its innards. But mostly I just kept quiet.

A few years into my time at the abattoir, a colleague started making flippant comments about "not being here in six months". Everyone would laugh it off. 

He was a bit of a joker, so people assumed he was taking the mick, saying he'd have a new job or something. But it made me feel really uneasy. I took him into a side room and asked him what he meant, and he broke down. He admitted that he was plagued by suicidal thoughts, that he didn't feel like he could cope any more, and that he needed help - but he begged me not to tell our bosses.

I was able to help him get treatment from his GP - and in helping him, I realised I needed to help myself too. I felt like the horrific things I was seeing had clouded my thinking, and I was in a full-blown state of depression. It felt like a big step, but I needed to get out of there.

After I left my job at the abattoir, things started looking brighter. I changed tack completely and began working with mental health charities, encouraging people to open up about their feelings and seek professional help - even if they don't think they need it, or feel like they don't deserve it.

A few months after leaving, I heard from one of my former colleagues. He told me that a man who'd worked with us, whose job was to flay the carcasses, had killed himself.

Sometimes I recall my days at the slaughterhouse. I think about my former colleagues working relentlessly, as though they were treading water in a vast ocean, with dry land completely out of sight. I remember my colleagues who didn't survive.

And at night, when I close my eyes and try to sleep, I still sometimes see hundreds of pairs of eyeballs staring back at me.

Illustrations by Katie Horwich

(Source: BBC)

Meet a scientist with a most delightful job: He studies baby laughter

Babies start laughing before they can speak, and this delicious sound just may serve as a powerful source of human communication and connection, says psychology researcher Caspar Addyman.
There are few sweeter sounds in this world than a baby’s laugh. As it turns out, provoking their giggles has little to do with splashy toys or silly jokes. In fact, the essential ingredient is both simpler and more profound. That’s according to British researcher Caspar Addyman, who spends his days investigating this wonderful question: What makes babies and young children laugh?

Babies laugh before they talk, which makes laughter one of the earliest clues as to how we humans experience the world. This is what first interested Addyman, a lecturer in developmental psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London and director of the Goldsmiths InfantLab. He wanted to study how babies learn, but, unlike a scientist working with adult subjects, “You can’t ask babies questions or get them to press buttons,” he says.

While babies typically say their first words when they’re between 9 and 12 months old, studies have found they begin laughing much earlier — at just 3 months. Addyman, who doesn’t have children of his own, was inspired by this fact and by watching his sister joking and laughing with her baby daughter. He wondered if laughter could be “a new way into seeing what babies were thinking about.”

As a first step into this field, Addyman collected parents’ observations of their babies’ laughter (in his research, he classifies babies as children up to 30 months, or two-and-a-half years old). From September 2012 to November 2013, they sent in answers to his questions: When did their babies first laugh? What situations do they find the funniest? What toys and games made them laugh the most? About 1,500 mothers and fathers from 62 countries across the globe — including the Philippines, Zambia, Uruguay and Australia — responded and some sent in short videos. Addyman was reassured to have them confirm their children began to chuckle at three months.

There is one game that babies all around the world find a laugh riot. Contenders for most hilarious game included such heavyweights as making silly noises or playing with puppets. The hands-down winner, even across different countries, was … peekaboo. Addyman was intrigued. He didn’t think its power was just its ability to surprise. Because while young babies may think the other person actually disappears when they hide behind their hands and get shocked into giggles when the hider reappears, older babies, such as two-year-olds, aren’t fooled — and yet they still find it absolutely hilarious.

A key ingredient that fuels early laughter: Sharing. This became clear in a lab study of laughter with preschoolers. For the experiment, Addyman observed how children aged between 2-and-a-half years old and 4 years old reacted to a funny cartoon when they watched it alone, with one other child, and in a group. Children laughed eight times as much when they were with another child than when they watched the cartoon on their own — even though they reported that the cartoon was just as funny in both situations.

Addyman had expected that a child’s laughter would increase with company. But interestingly, the children didn’t laugh any more in a big group than they laughed with just one other person. This suggested to him that laughter is more than a contagious reaction; instead, it’s “a signal to someone else that’s there,” he says. “The main reason they’re laughing is to communicate that they find this funny.” For example, when preschoolers watched the cartoon alone, they sometimes looked around and tried to catch the researcher’s eye during funny moments.

The need to communicate with laughter may have deep roots in our development as a species, speculates Addyman. Evolutionary biology suggests it’s a way for humans to share with other humans — and thus, to belong. While he is still teasing out why children needed to signal their enjoyment of the cartoon to whoever was there, he thinks it has to do with the idea, raised by Oxford University anthropologist and primatologist Robin Dunbar, that laughter could be a replacement for the earlier primate behavior of grooming. “Grooming was a one-on-one, unfakeable investment of time in somebody else,” explains Addyman, and it created trust among group members as well as a sense of community.

Laughter is similarly difficult to fake. But while you can’t groom a bunch of people at the same time, you can share laughter — and the pleasant feelings that come with it — with many individuals at once. “It’s a genuine signal that you send when you’re in a relaxed and comfortable situation,” Addyman says. Seen this way, mutual merriment can serve as both social cue and social glue: Laughter makes you feel like you belong. And if laughter is an important social interaction for adults, he adds, “it goes double for babies, where they don’t have as many other ways to connect.”

If peekaboo fails, try tickling — but please limit it to the babies you know. The importance of a sense of belonging explains another result from Addyman’s original survey. In it, tickling was the most popular answer to the question: “What is the one thing sure to make your baby laugh?”

While the physical stimulus is an important factor, Addyman says, once again, the social context for tickling is even more so. He cites none other than Charles Darwin, one of the first scientists to study children’s laughter, who wrote in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “a young child, if tickled by a strange man, would scream from fear.” “You can just imagine Darwin going out and proving that to himself in Victorian parks,” Addyman jokes. “A big strange man with a beard coming up to you would not be pleasant,” because tickling only works “with someone that the baby knows very well.”

So, what really makes babies laugh? “My one-word answer is ‘people,’” Addyman says. “If you want to make it two words, it’s ‘adult attention.’ Or, ‘human connection.’” Take peekaboo, for instance: compared to other games, such as making funny noises or using puppets, it is, he explains, “pure social interaction — it really is about the eye contact and the connection with the baby.” As anyone who’s played peekaboo knows, the key moment is when, as Addyman puts it, “you come back into eye contact with them, and the fact you’re keeping the game going is delightful and causes them to laugh.” The baby’s laughter is their way of sharing and rewarding you for this prolonged attention. “They’re having a conversation with you,” he says.

But we’re still very much on the frontier when it comes to the science of baby laughter, says Addyman. For his next study, he wants to find out whether repeating a joke affects how babies laugh. To do so, he has launched a citizen science study using a platform developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study launched in March 2019, and will be open for at least four months. Anyone with a webcam can participate. Following a script, parents try out different jokes on their babies as their webcam records the interaction; Addyman’s team will study the videos and look at how parental engagement and joke timing play into the process.

Among the broader questions that he hopes to explore someday is: How does a baby’s laughter play a role in their learning process? He thinks laughter could be an expression of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” a joyful state which involves alert engagement with a task and a feeling of control. Babies “seem like they’re being made happy when they get something new,” Addyman says. Given laughter’s social power, it could be that babies laugh to reward other people for staying engaged in the learning game and for helping them forward. Their delight, and the help they continue receiving because of it, are, he adds, “part of what drives them forward to master the next thing, gradually achieving greater and greater mastery over the world.”

Addyman’s research has inspired a play specifically written to make babies burst into laughter. Director Sarah Argent of London’s Polka Theatre wanted to create a play about baby science for an audience of — oh, yes — babies, so she visited Addyman’s lab to learn from his work. Over several months, he and two PhD students were scientific consultants, making suggestions such as how to use peekaboo and bubbles (“our secret weapon in the lab,” Addyman calls it) to grab the attention of very young theatergoers.

In the 45-minute piece titled Shake, Rattle and Roll, which was staged in 2016, an actress explores an environment based on Addyman’s lab and plays with different experiments, including a family of rubber ducks. Before the performance, he notes, the actress personally introduced herself to every baby in the audience, and after that, the babies couldn’t take their eyes off her and they broke up at her antics. He says he can’t take credit for suggesting she do this, but its effectiveness reinforces the importance of engagement when it comes to tickling children’s funny bones. “When we’re thinking about laughter, we’re always thinking about, what was funny, what was the joke,” Addyman says. “But actually there doesn’t have to be a joke a lot of the time.”

Addyman admits that, because of his job, he’s become a good “baby wrangler”. He adds, “I think I can confidently say, ‘Yes, I can make most babies laugh.’” One day, however, his niece — the baby that helped inspire his research, came to visit. She showed that Addyman shouldn’t quit his day job to be a full-time baby wrangler just yet. “She was completely unimpressed by our studies,” he says wryly.

(Source: Ideas.Ted)

Bengaluru techie attacked by mob for reporting illegal cow slaughter to police

A Bengaluru woman accused the police of being complicit in a mob unleashing a violent attack on her and the car she was travelling in for condemning illegal cow slaughter going on in Talaghattapura in Bengaluru.

A Bengaluru woman was brutally thrashed by a 100-member mob for reporting illegal cow slaughter to police and trying to rescue the animals from the slaughterhouse.

Nandini, along with a couple of friends, was driving by Avalahalli area near Tippu Circle in Bengaluru's JP Nagar when she spotted some suspicious activity. Nandini says that her friend saw cows being taken to a secluded lane in the area and being slaughtered.

It is an area where many illegal beef shops operate. They had also heard of 14 cows being found there. Nandini and her friends went to Thalaghattapura police station around 6 30 PM and lodged a complaint.

"Police assured us they will take necessary action. We sat there at the station and noticed at least 15-20 policemen there. When they were leaving to locate the area we mentioned, we requested them to take us along so that we could direct them," Nandini said.

"Two constables got into my car (Innova). When we reached the lane where cow slaughter was going on, I could see crowds there. I thought it could be people gathering seeing police vehicles."

"Assuming there would be police inside the lane, we went inside. There, I was shocked to see that we were alone. Not one cop was there. The mob got into a frenzy and hurled bricks at my vehicle," she said.

Nandini said that the two constables who were with her got down from her car and did nothing.
"They shouted pro-Pakistan slogans and continued raining stones at my car from all sides. I somehow managed to get myself out of these. All this happened around 8 30 PM. Window panes of my car shattered and my right shoulder was injured."

Nandini, woman attacked by mob, with her car that was destroyed

Nandini told India Today that when she returned to the police station, the sub-inspector there shouted at them, refused to take pictures of them as proof of the attack, and alleged that nobody at the station bothered to help.

"I now feel the SI work hand-in-glove with those criminals," she said.

"It looked like a trap to teach us a lesson. I have lodged another complaint but they have watered down the IPC sections," Nandini told India Today.

Former chief minister of Karnataka BS Yeddyurappa condemned the violence on Twitter. He said, "Condemn the brutal mob-attack on the woman who exposed illegal cow slaughter. This violent attack today in Bengaluru is another proof law and order breakdown under Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah.

B.S. Yeddyurappa 

✔@BSYBJP

Condemn the brutal mob-attack on the woman who exposed illegal cow slaughter. This violent attack today in Bengaluru is another proof law & order breakdown under @cmofkarnatakaSh. @siddaramiah

7:20 PM - Oct 15, 2017

•  6969 Replies
 
•  619619 Retweets
 
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(Source: India Today)

Cowboys and Indians

Killing cows is illegal in most of India, but rustlers still round up cattle for slaughter.

Crime is a problem in any big country - but in predominantly Hindu India, an underground mafia has embarked on lucrative raids running counter to sacred beliefs: cow rustling.

Despite being a blessed creature in India, cattle theft has grown rampant throughout the country, authorities say. Cows are illegally sold to factories to be processed into leather and, surprisingly, more and more often for beef on the dinner plate.

With tens of thousands of cattle left to roam freely on city streets and in the countryside, rustlers generally pack pick-up trucks with 10 cows or more, with each animal fetching between $35-$90 in the illegal trade.

In a country where about 29.8 percent of the 1.2 billion populace earn only 40 cents a day, a single night's cow catch of $900 makes it a highly lucrative enterprise.

India's cowboys often scout for stray animals during the day and seize them at night. Gangs of rustlers come well prepared and in some instances heavily armed, with some not hesitating to open fire at police vehicles when chased after "lifting" cows, police say.

"They even threw the cattle from their vehicle in front of the chasing police vehicles, thereby forcing the chasing vehicles to stop," said an extensive police report discussing how officers caught a notorious rustler.

Read more here...