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Abstract
Drawing on fieldwork with the veterinary staff at an Indian wildlife sanctuary, this paper examines the controversy surrounding an epizootic outbreak of tuberculosis among a population of sloth bears. As these bears fell ill and began to die, the veterinary staff asked whether they might be culled, inciting allegations of incompetence and cruelty from both the media and government bureaucrats. This paper works through a series of ethico-legal questions regarding the cullability of these tuberculous bears, which depended in part on how the bears were classified – as wild or domestic, captive or free, curable or incurable. As boundary-crossing figures, the bears confounded straightforward efforts at classification, rendering their fates open to debate. In treating them, the veterinary staff feared that they were only extending their suffering, producing a form of life that might be thought of as iatrogenic. In this light, this paper suggests that cruelty – both the cruelty of culling and that of treatment – might be figured as an unavoidable aspect of the relation of dependency between animals and their human caretakers.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Mara Green, Saiba Varma, and Emma Varley, along with two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on various drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Ethical Approval
This research began with approval from UC Berkeley’s Institutional Review Board (Protocol Number 2010-11-2558) and followed the American Anthropological Association’s ethics guidelines throughout. Oral consent was obtained from each participant in this study.
Notes
1 On the contested status of Kalanders as caste or tribe, see Verma Citation2013.
2 Wildlife SOS, the NGO that supports the government to operate the Bangalorean sanctuary, established three other sanctuaries in Agra, Bhopal, and Purulia (West Bengal). Additional government-run sanctuaries are located across Kerala, Gujarat, and Rajasthan.
3 Despite the strident ableism of Illich’s argument, his work has nevertheless been important to critiques of the medicalization of disability (see, e.g. Linton Citation1998).
4 If the concept of iatrogenic life it taken literally, as physician-produced life, it might be understood as what has occasionally been referred to in the literature as a kind of ‘positive iatrogenesis’ (see, e.g. Weinstein Citation1991; Lamont and Christakis Citation1999; Ozgur et al. Citation2016). Examples might include the extension of life for those with chronic and incurable, but not necessarily debilitating conditions, including diabetes and HIV—although even in these cases, life extension is not necessarily an unalloyed and unquestionable good (see Venkat Citation2017). Illich, however, would have likely argued that such forms of medical intervention are far from ‘positive’ precisely because they maintain the subject’s dependence on the physician.
5 The average bear at the sanctuary weighed around seventy kilograms (a particularly well-nourished bear closer to a hundred).
6 See, for example, the critical coverage in the Bangalore Mirror: ‘The death of so many bears due to tuberculosis has raised questions about the hygiene and sanitation facilities at the sloth bear enclosure inside [the sanctuary], which houses nearly 100 rescued bears. “It is sad to see the bears housed in small enclosures . . . Despite the free space, aging bears choose to remain inside these dingy sheds and become vulnerable to contagious diseases,” said Srinivas Murthy who visited the biological park recently. Forest minister C P Yogishwar is also of the same opinion. “I feel pity for these animals. The condition of the park is such that you never know when they are going to die,” Yogishwar said’ (Bannerghatta Loses Another Bear Citation2012).
7 This refusal is notable in light of the Government of India’s avowed goal of eradicating tuberculosis in the human population in India, impossible to achieve as long as lingering animal reservoirs pose a constant threat of re-infection.
8 But see Kopnina (Citation2017) for an important critique of the devaluation of animal suffering by recourse to human suffering.
9 For Peter Singer, see www.abc.net.au/religion/moral-progress-and-animal-welfare/10101318. For PETA, see www.peta.org/features/gandhi. The phrasing of this attribution is suggestive of the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”’ (Matthew 25:38-40 NRSV). It wouldn’t at all have been surprising for Gandhi to have been inspired by scripture, given his interest in comparative religion and his admiration for the New Testament (on this, see Skaria Citation2016).
10 The veterinary staff used ‘culling’ and ‘euthanasia’ interchangeably. In veterinary discourse more broadly, these terms are often used interchangeably, although there are occasionally distinctions made between killing many and killing one, killing without concern for suffering and providing a good death, and killing for the human or herd and killing the animal for its own sake.
11 For a reference to such practices of ad hoc culling, see Amble, Krishnan, and Srivastava (Citation1958).
12 Of course, there are those for whom the lives of the bears would be more inviolable than cows (for example, secular-minded conversation biologists), precisely because they are ostensibly wild and not domestic animals. Here, the question of sacrality drops out.
13 Circular 7(v)(a) – Letter No. 702/94, Central Zoo Authority, Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, January 1995.
14 In his defense, Arun noted that there was no broader ecological benefit to keeping the sloth bears alive, as the sanctuary was not involved in breeding programs leading to the re-introduction of the bears into the wild. ‘Captive animals won’t help the ecosystem’, he insisted.
15 Perhaps the most famous recorded encounter involved the dreaded Sloth Bear of Mysore, which killed twelve people and mutilated two dozen others. Rumors suggested that the bear had taken to partially consuming some of its victims, a decided variation from its usual diet. In his elegy to the vanishing forests and wildlife of India, which doubled as a lament for the vanishing conditions of possibility of shikar, or hunting, the Indian-born Scottish hunter and adventurer Anderson (Citation1957) recounts his killing of the bear as a form of stewardship of nature (but largely for the sake of humans).
16 Retrieved from http://imgur.com/a/9D1wu.