Well, this photograph in its unpixellated form is on Twitter today 27 June 2023 but I have discovered that the image featured in a 2016 report by the News Minute website with the title, “Kerala politicians beat street dogs to death, hang them on a pole take out a parade”. I don’t know what the last bit of that sentence means I think it means hanging the corpses on a pole and parading them around the municipality.
The insensitivity is astonishing. The interesting aspect of the Twitter publication of this photograph is that the tweet tells us that there are approximately 9000 churches in Kerala according to the Quora website. Of these 9000 there are 5600 catholic churches, 2000+ Orthodox churches, Jacobite and apostolic churches, and 1500 Protestant and Pentecostal churches.
There is a lot of religion in Kerala but clearly not a lot of religious people although they pretend to be religious. I suspect that in every one of those churches there is a minister who would preach that this kind of violence against animals is against their religion.
I am also told on the News Checker website that killing dogs like this is a violation of section 11 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Further, I’m told that these are politicians who are culling dogs. These are the lawmakers of Kerala and they are breaking the law in a brutally cruel way but they are also violating their religion assuming that they do have some religious beliefs which is entirely possible bearing in mind the huge number of churches in that Indian state.
All the state is called “God’s own country”. What a laugh. The problem arises because they have a large number of stray dogs. When you think about it is a form of madness.
The leaders and their citizens have created stray dogs with their carelessness. The stray dogs are suffering because nobody looks after them and they should be domestic dogs in a good home. They compound the problem by beating them to death because they don’t like stray dogs wandering around the streets.
On this page there is one pixelated photograph. On the News Checker website there are many similar photographs. It appears that his form of obscene cruelty against animals was (and probably is) commonplace. All the photographs are similar with people standing around and the dead dogs laid out on the ground.
The News Checker website allows me to add some detail to the photograph. They state that the “cadres of the youth wing of the Kerala Congress Mani Group beat the dogs to death, tied a few to a pole and paraded them in Kottayam town. They were protesting against the recurrent attacks by stray dogs and Union Minister Maneka Gandhi’s approach towards a stray dog problem in Kerala.”
This was a culling of dogs. The site also states that on 16 September a municipality ward councillor of Piravam in Ernakulam, also a Kerala Congress (M) member, was arrested by the police for killing ten stray dogs. He was later given bail.” His name was Gils Periappuram. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that he was never punished.
