Q: How do you deal with the estimated 40,000 cows who wander the streets of Delhi?
A: Put a price on their heads! Sort of.
An Indian court has issued an order telling authorities in Delhi to offer a reward for people catching stray cows roaming the capital’s streets.
The Delhi High Court ordered southern Delhi authorities to pay 2,000 rupees ($45) to anyone delivering a stray cow to them.
Though another court order addressed this situation two years ago, not much progress has been made; the animals are still a traffic hazard. The bounty-equipped bovines will be taken to a shelter before they are auctioned off to fund the scheme.
This is something I’ve always been curious about– where do the meandering animals come from in the first place? Are they drawn to the bright lights of the big city like so many of us villagers?
Most are let loose to wander by unscrupulous dairy owners.
And how’s this new strategery working for you, Delhi (to bite Dr. Phil)?
Catching a free roaming cow is not easy – on the first day of the cash scheme there was not one claimant.
Why get rid of the cows? Delhi should embrace them! Other cities had to settle for crappy statues, Delhi has the real thing!
cows aren’t the only animals with a bounty on them…but they ARE the only creatures wanted alive. oh just read on:
Cash reward for rat tail delivery By Geeta Pandey BBC News, Delhi
uh yeah, reponse to the grisly request has been SO good, they’ve halved the reward available for each tail presented– it’s only one ruppee now. shudder
Anakin is saved.
Statues don’t poop.
3 pounds of poop per day per cow times 40000 cows and you end up with 60 tons of poop per day thats 219000 tons of poop per year in Delhi alone.
there’s a reason that modern nations tend to ban farm animals from being raised within city limits: disease from their feces. modern post-agricultural humanity might have developed tolerances, but they are still a non-trivial drag on our productivity. that being said, i believe chickens are a much bigger problem if i recall correctly because they tend to scatter more diffusely.
p.s. there are ‘rat hunting’ tribes (by profession) in central india who eat what they catch.
uh huh, i was joking.
In that vein, though, they must wreak havoc on the natural vegetation in the city.
they must wreak havoc on the natural vegetation in the city.
why? i assumed nitrates from the feces would be great! i think it is human digestive tracts that are being wreaked to havoc.
Eating. He’s talking about garbage in, not garbage out.
But here, it’s also a fuel source.
Austria settled for cow statues.
Check out Amit Varma’s post on this.
Apparently even if you manage to round up a Cash Cow, you don’t get the 2000 Rupees promised at the Cow Pound. You get a receipt.
You also have to bring your voter registration card to prove you are a resident of the area where you caught the cow.
Once people realized you don’t actually get paid until the bureaucracy authorizes it (meaning, you will never, ever get the 2000 Rupees), people have stopped trying to Catch Cash Cows.
Why make kids Kow Tow? If they Catch Cow, give Cash Now.
i always get a sense of adventure when my cousins and I are driving around Delhi, swerving around cows, cyclists, scooters, buses and assorted roadblocks. Feels like a live game of Grand Theft Auto.
It’s impressive that he managed to generate 20 posts on cows 🙂
That’s 14 in all (including this one). And allow me to send an abacus to your mailing address.
Anyways, I don’t think poop-control was the major motivator for this bounty hunt. If I might be so bold as to speculate, I suspect the involvment of the recent converts to free-markets among the gents in the finance ministry behind this simple and effective scheme.
It is the average Delhi bureaucrat that is the most irked by the bovine ilk. They, the cattle that is, tend to squat (see pic above) and ruminate wordlessly, much like the parliamentary pen-pushers themselves. Unlike the rest of the populace, the holy cow is less likely to be impressed by the flashing red light that sets the mandarins in Lutyen’s Delhi apart from the hoi-polloi. And we know that any brown saheb worth his IAS degree wont stand for that kind of treatment.
The cows get to the cities because the cities were once villages (I can speak for Delhi and Chennai) and the villagers never really left – in fact, their lands were protected by the govt.
Oh, I was talking about Amit Verma (he has them numbered for our benefit :). But SM has 14 posts on cows? that’s shocking to me.
I’ll still take the abacus though. Can you just paypal me the money? I swear I’ll buy it 🙂
who milks all of these cows?
I wondered about all the stray cows when I was in India not so long ago. Supposedly, the cows, and other animals, found in the streets are diseased and not worth anything for the farmers to keep, so they’re all over the place. Also, I haven’t heard of rewarding folks for bringing them in, but I have heard of hefty fines if you accidentally hit one.
$45/cow * 40,000cows = 1.8MILLION dollars . Thats American dollars. Time to go back to india and get rich.