Urban Livestock!

The amount of urban livestock is really impressive. There are literally cows, water buffaloes, and goats all over the place. Even in cities of 2-3 million people there are "farm" animals everywhere. To a lesser extent there are also dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, and sheep living amongst the city populous. Even on busy roads you will find cows laying in the street, in the middle of intersections just non-nonchalantly chewing the cud. Usually the cows, which are holy, have attendants to steer the steers out of harms way, but I guess sometimes those attendants take the day off. Or maybe some animals are too divine to have humans telling them where they can and cannot go. I am not sure, but there are a lot of these city dwelling cows and they find a lot of food in the rubbish and refuse that piles up in certain areas. It is not uncommon to see these animals chewing on cardboard or paper. Sometimes the cows' horns are painted in bright orange, red, or blue and occasionally you see an animal with rainbow painted horns that reminds me of a pack of Lifesavers. I don't know what it means, but I think it is a way to distinguish who owns them and to keep track of them based on the color patterns. As far as the goats, I think they are always owned by someone. I believe that they are not holy and at many restaurants you can have goat meat, commonly called mutton since British times. I think they provide a lot of milk for cheese and things too. At some point I will capture some footage and post it online to show you the zoo of animals let loose on the metropolitan streets. When you combine all the people, honking cars, noisy buses, street vendors, bicycles, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and animals it creates a rather surreal show!