A Message from Ingrid Newkirk

I am just back from India, and there is someone I’d like you to meet. His name is Roushya. Actually, we don’t know what his mother called him (all mothers name their little ones – remember Washoe, the chimpanzee who even had a sign language name for her baby?), but Roushya is the name humans gave him.

For years, he pulled a heavily laden cart through the streets of Old Delhi, day in and day out, steered by a rope threaded through his nostrils, sometimes his flank stung by the whip, his back hit with a pole. The wooden yoke of the cart dug into his shoulders as cars and trucks honked and wove around him in the crowded streets, and the muscles in his legs must have hurt.

All that is behind him now. He was “laid off” because of PETA India’s mechanization project – which recently rescued its 150th animal – funded by PETA’s Global Compassion Fund. A shiny new e-vehicle is doing the hauling in Roushya’s place.

As for his new life, I’m sure he could never have imagined that one day the painful nose rope would be pulled out, that he would be able to walk at his own pace on soft ground, graze and gaze, and enjoy retirement at a PETA-supported sanctuary. Every evening, he listens to Indian classical music. Every day, he is groomed with a brush. And he now has a friend to sit with him.

When we say, “Every animal is someone,” we include this dear old man. Let no one tell you that bulls are fierce. Just like anyone else, if they’re taunted, tormented, tortured, or treated like a “thing,” they may fight back. But underneath it all, every one of them is someone who can suffer.

Please, weigh in against bullfights, for Roushya’s sake.