Source: newsweek.washingtonpost.com
INDIA, June 16, 2010 (By Aseem Shukla): “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” (Mahatma Gandhi)
For panentheistic Hindus, who with many Dharma faiths and Pagan traditions worship Earth as a manifestation of the Mother Goddess, divinity is found within every part of nature just as it transcends an earthly realm. The suffering animals endure in our blind pursuit of black gold to support a craven addiction will bear the brunt of the consequences of karma.
It is empirical that every action has an equal and opposite reaction; while today the shrimpers and oyster harvesters are enduring for our collective sins, we must know that all of us will be affected as the dominoes of suffering fall. Hindu iconography is replete with representations of animals and even trees and plants as infused with the divine (Lord Ganesha, famously endowed with an elephant head) or Godly vehicles–Lord Vishnu’s serpent, Ganesha’s mouse or Shiva’s bull. Hindu seers describe how the souls of seemingly insensate animals are very much on their own path to liberation.
The difference between the Dharma traditions view of animals and the Abrahamic perspective that man has dominion over animals and the earth is stark indeed. It is a logical consequence, then, that over 400 million of mostly Hindu India’s billion declare themselves vegetarian according to a recent poll, and make up more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined.
Amongst Dharma traditions, many Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs join Jains, whose unequivocal insistence on ahimsa, or non-violence, is absolute and doctrinally fundamental. Violence against animals is tantamount to harming one’s self.
My own dog’s eyes showed sad confusion recently when she lacerated her coat on a tree branch in our backyard, and I felt certain that I saw the same innocent perplexity in the face of the oil-coated pelican flashed across the news wires last week. To a Hindu, eating meat causes one to ingest and absorb the slaughtered creature’s pain, suffering and terror before its death. Stop the cycle of accumulating negative karma, our scriptures tell us, and work we must to ameliorate not only the suffering of animals caused by the oil spill in the Gulf, but also species endangered by human assaults on habitats elsewhere.
(To read the complete essay, go to source above.)