‘Learn from mistakes made by India’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1960)’

World-renowned animal rights activist and environmentalist, Maneka Gandhi, has appealed to the government of Sri Lanka not to pass a supposed Animal Welfare Bill, which, she says, is in reality ‘a pro-butcher, anti-animal bill’. “I can understand this happening in any other country but Sri Lanka, which is gentle and so close to nature?” she has said.

Maneka, who is also a member of the Indian Parliament says, “This Bill should be one of the finest in the world because you could learn from the mistakes made by the Indian Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960. However, in the last six decades we have done much to improve it by bringing in additional acts.

“Instead, you are bringing in an Act which will increase the suffering of animals and make the Animal Welfare Movement which is growing fast, much weaker.

“None of the Amendments to the Act of 2022 are going to help animals. They are clearly going to help the lobbies that exploit animals cruelly.

“The Act exempts animals slaughtered for food from being in its ambit of protection. Anyone who has seen the way slaughterhouses treat animals, the way pigs are stabbed repeatedly  after being kept in miserable conditions and have their hair pulled out manually to be sold for paintbrushes before killing them, the way chickens are carried upside down and have their throats slit while their heads are squeezed under feet, to see calves crowded into trucks and repeatedly hammered to death, to  see cows being injected daily by a drug called oxytocin so that they go into labour pains twice a day and their milk gushes out …. It is useless to make an Act protecting dogs and cats and guinea pigs when 90% of the violence on animals is on farm animals. This is utterly retrograde.

“In India, all experiments on animals are forbidden in school and college teaching centres and the CPCSEA is a body that regulates any research that involves animals. Most experiments are now through computers. Your Act exempts live animals in experiments from protection, allowing them to be used in teaching or any experiment without any regulation or thought of their wellbeing. There are international guidelines for accepting any research and unless Sri Lanka adopts the three ‘R’s – Replacement, Reduction and Refinement – and switches to alternatives, most of your research will not be accepted as science anywhere in the world.

“India has banned the use of animals in cosmetics. We have even stopped cosmetics from being sold that have been experimented on abroad. But now you have, in this new Act, allowed the use of live animals in experiments on cosmetics. Are you going back 30 years? Do you want Sri Lankan monkeys to eat 50 lipsticks at a time till they die? Or rabbits to have hairspray put into their eyes in the Draize test till they break their neck struggling against the pain.

“I am told that the use of animals for cultural events has also been allowed. Cultural events in India mean whipping cows to death to make them run like horses, through rivers of water, it means animal sacrifices in temples, it means cock fighting, it means feeding animals alcohol and then jumping on them as they run crazed through the streets. Is this what you will allow? It also includes eating animals like dogs for food in Nagaland and cats by tribals in Chennai. Does any of this fit into a humane culture?

“Basically, this is an Act that allows and condemns animals to permanent suffering without legal address while pretending to do the opposite. Ultimately it is meant for people who bring in foreign dogs and cats and are sometimes mean to them.

“Any right-thinking government that represents the culture of this beautiful island will not do this. It will bring a huge backlash internationally.”