This unfeeling cruelty and callous indifference to the sufferings of the lower animals is a crying evil, and every magistrate, European, and educated native, might do much to ease their burdens.  Tremendous numbers of bullocks and ponies die from sheer neglect and ill treatment every year.  It is now becoming so serious a trouble, that in many villages plough-bullocks are too few in number for the area of land under cultivation.  The tillage suffers, the crops deteriorate, this reacts on prices, the ryot sinks lower and lower, and gets more into the grasp of the rapacious money-lender.  In many villages I have seen whole tracts of land relapsed into purtee, or untilled waste, simply from want of bullocks to draw the plough.  Severe epidemics, like foot and mouth disease and pleuro, occasionally sweep off great numbers; but, I repeat, that annually the lives of hundreds of valuable animals are sacrificed by sheer sloth, dirt, inattention, and brutal cruelty.

In some parts of India, cattle poisoning for the sake of the hides is extensively practised.  The Chumars, that is, the shoemakers, furriers, tanners, and workers in leather and skins generally, frequently combine together in places, and wilfully poison cattle and buffaloes.  There is actually a section in the penal code taking cognisance of the crime.  The Hindoo will not touch a dead carcase, so that when a bullock mysteriously sickens and dies, the Chumars haul away the body, and appropriate the skin.  Some luckless witch is blamed for the misfortune, when the rascally Chumars themselves are all the while the real culprits.  The police, however, are pretty successful in detecting this crime, and it is not now of such frequent occurrence [3].

Highly as the pious Hindoo venerates the sacred bull of Shira, his treatment of his mild patient beasts of burden is a foul blot on his character.  Were you to shoot a cow, or were a Mussulman to wound a stray bullock which might have trespassed, and be trampling down his opium or his tobacco crop, and ruining his fields, the Hindoos would rise en masse to revenge the insult offered to their religion.  Yet they scruple not to goad their bullocks, beat them, half starve them, and let their gaping wounds fester and become corrupt.  When the poor brute becomes old and unable to work, and his worn-out teeth unfit to graze, he is ruthlessly turned out to die in a ditch, and be torn to pieces by jackals, kites, and vultures.  The higher classes and well-to-do farmers show much consideration for high-priced well-conditioned animals, but when they get old or unwell, and demand redoubled care and attention, they are too often neglected, till, from sheer want of ordinary care, they rot and die.