Mother Tulasi Gets a Bath
by Bhaktin Alysia
A nice break in the weather affords a most auspicious opportunity to bathe the cows. Three months of severe winter has resulted in three months of accumulated dung cake on the thighs of Mother Tulasi. I properly applied full hose pressure and nothing happened. What now? One hour later, arms sore from brushing out layer by layer, Tulasi is far from clean but tomorrow is another day.
Working in the barn has been such a pleasure for me. Yesterday, I took in a good hour nap, literally, on top of our baby bull Madhava. Every once in awhile, DROP! Madhava’s head would slip off my knee and briefly startle his slumber. Might this be the perfection of life?
Over the last month I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to give several short workshops to visiting college students on cow protection and environmental sustainability. Last week was a group of 60 or so good-lookin’ folks from Ohio. Two months of cow seva with supplemental research is solidifying in my heart the absolute importance to campaign for cow protection throughout the world.
As a fading political activist for indigenous people’s rights and environmental justice, I never fully realized how the livestock industry, and its eternal meat-eating consumer consorts, are the original source of these injustices. Agricultural peoples destroyed by meat-eating
peoples, generating byproducts (children), desperately needing more land to raise more grain for feed, more animals for slaughter, more houses for their meat-eating children, etc. The magnitude of the livestock industry continues to annihilate the world’s rainforest reserves, contaminate the fresh water supply, deplete the ozone layer, devour natural habitat, displace peoples and destroy native cultures. The torchlight of knowledge has made this so clear,
so obvious. My former ignorance disgusts me.
