Gadhimai Festival: Nepalese Religious Observance Bans Animal Sacrifice From Now On
Organizers of Nepal’s Gadhimai Festival have announced that animal sacrifice – a tradition dating back 300 years at the festival – will be banned beginning with the 2019 observance, DNA India is reporting.
The Gadhimai Festival, according to BBC News, takes place every five years at the Gadhimai Temple in Nepal. Hundreds of thousands of devotees – some 80 percent coming from India – converge on the temple to offer sacrifices to the Hindu goddess Gadhimai, believing that doing so will bring prosperity.
By some estimates, as many as 500,000 water buffalo, goats, chickens, and other animals were sacrificed at the 2009 Gadhimai Festival, according to Huffington Post UK. Thanks to campaigns by animal-rights groups, by 2014 the number of animal sacrifices is estimated to have fallen by 70 percent. Organizers want the number of animals sacrificed at Gadhimai Festival 2019 to be zero, says Ram Chandra Shah, chairman of the Gadhimai Temple Trust.
“The Gadhimai Temple Trust hereby declares our formal decision to end animal sacrifice. With your help, we can ensure Gadhimai 2019 is free from bloodshed. Moreover, we can ensure Gadhimai 2019 is a momentous celebration of life. For generations, pilgrims have sacrificed animals to the Goddess Gadhimai, in the hope of a better life. For every life taken, our heart is heavy. The time has come to transform an old tradition. The time has come to replace killing and violence with peaceful worship and celebration.”
Animal rights activists welcomed the news. Gauri Maulekhi, the spokesperson for the Humane Society of India, says that animal sacrifice has no place in the modern era.
“Animal sacrifice is a highly regressive practice and no nation in the modern world should entertain it.”
Manoj Gautam of Animal Welfare Network Nepal is similarly pleased.
“We applaud the temple committee’s decision to end this mass slaughter of innocent animals and hope that they will continue to support us in our future endeavours for protecting animals in the country.”
For activist Deepak Adhikari, however, calls to ban animal sacrifice at Gadhimai Festival are, at best, hypocritical. Writing in The Nepali Times in 2014, Adhikari called out Westerners who criticize animal sacrifice but continue to eat meat.
“For elite international activists, the problem seems to be that the animals are decapitated en masse in full public view. So, it’s OK to decapitate them en masse inside a slaughterhouse.”
It is unclear, as of this post, what sorts of observances and rites will be practiced at future Gadhimai Festivals now that animal sacrifice has been banned.
[Image courtesy of: Getty Images/Omar Havana]
