Dwapara Yuga - Animal Rights

In the depths of Kali Yuga, animals were to be worked and/or eaten. The concept of pets was relatively alien in the works of the Greek Philosophers.

As we ascend in Dwapara Yuga, less and less animals are being used for transportation, with only a few horses as rich men's playthings, or for use in official parades.

An enlightened few eat no, or very little, meat but in early Dwapara Yuga the advent of factory farming has moved meat from being a relatively rare dish due to its once high cost to being an everyday, low-priced offering, marketed by generations of politicians with slogans like a 'car in every garage and a chicken in every pot' (Hoover, 1928).

Dwapara Yuga has seen a growing awareness of the value of animals and plants beyond just being something to be ruthlessly and thoughtlessly exploited on a mass scale e.g. Silent Spring in 1962.

Swami Kriyananda provides the following insight in his recent book "The New Path": "The evolution of awareness begins at the lowest levels of conscious identity. It moves upwards automatically at first, through mineral, plant, insect and lower animal forms until at last it attains the human level (from 5 to 8 million incarnations). From this point on, evolution ceases to be automatic. Man's brain and nervous system, being more highly developed, grant him that specificity of awareness which is called the ego. Man has the ability to exercise intelligent discrimination, and also has a certain amount of free will. From this point on, he can either speed up his spiritual evolution, delay it, or temporarily reverse it, by his own use or misuse of freedom".

Sri Yukteswar was a vegetarian but prior to monkhood had eaten eggs and fish. His advice to students was to follow any simple diet that proves suited to one's constitution. Yogananda often had to discourage monks and nuns from crazy diet-related excesses as nutritional fads then as now swept California and the world.

The suffering from too much consumption of meat is not just that of the short lives of animals in factory farms but the effects of those death-vibrations. In countries like Argentina, with the highest beef consumption in the world, many lives are cut short by health complications due to over-indulgence.

In countries like the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, the ravages of poor diet are apparent to anyone stepping off an airplane, with masses of people so large that they have trouble walking. Part of the explanation is basic schooling in dietary information being suppressed in order to assist lobby groups such as dairy, beef, sugar and cereal farmers in moving their products, no matter in what proportions (and no doubt the added business for doctors and dentists). In France, the government works to ensure that alcohol consumption is perceived as beneficial, again fueled by a powerful agricultural lobby.

A recent phenomenon seen in the West is the rise of pets, not just as household guards and rat catchers but in some extreme cases almost substitute children for singles, childless couples, or empty nesters. In the wealthy United States, some doting owners think nothing of spending several thousands on veterinary care for an ailing cat but simultaneously perceive impoverished or under-educated inner city children as worthless, undeserving 'bums', especially when they are from different race or religious backgrounds.

Sadly, certain people living in tightly packed, polluted and indifferent cities have such an aura of hostility and negativity, for example in certain Paris or London neighborhoods literally built upon mounds of the dead in catacombs, that other humans flee them and they exult in the so-called love of dogs and cats, who by nature 'love' anyone who feeds and pays attention to them.

Of course not all pets fall into these extremes. Yogananda's boyhood home in Calcutta was filled with a number of cats and dogs last time this author visited.

As always, the accent should be on harmony and the consciousness with which we interact with animals, not the exaggeration of slaughter nor the misunderstanding of treating them as humans. A cat filled with chocolate and never exercised will, like us, soon have difficulty walking and end with diabetes and/or a heart attack! Yogananda describes just such a case with the fawn at his Ranchi school.