The Monk’s Podcast 82 with Shyamananda – Animals and their place in an eco-friendly world

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to the Monks Podcast. Hare Krishna.
It’s been a long time since we have been together. We discussed podcasts, but we are recording one after a very long time. Yes.
So, did you have any specific topic in mind today? Yes. So, I just tell our audience that we will be showing you a small video about an elephant which was shot in his skull by poachers and the wound was there for a very long time and then the elephant approaches another group of humans in a vehicle and then they take him to some rangers, medical team. They successfully sedate him with surgery.
They remove the bullet from his skull and the elephant is now again ill and hurting. So, as you see the video, people, the internet, YouTube exploded with all kinds of comments and today we can have people from all over the world looking at one particular small thing and commenting on that and I think I told you how I went through the more than the comments kind of engrossed my mind so much and I took about eight or nine salient points from that. So, I thought of having a podcast on that and that’s what we are having now.
So, it is animals and their place in an eco-friendly or an environmentally conscious world. So, Homo sapiens, we are rational human beings and we are in the 21st century. We are very proud of our technology, space progress and so many things.
How are we faring on in this particular subject? Are we allowing animals to have their space? Do we recognise animal rights? So, these are some of the things we will be touching today. So, since I got a bit inspired, our format today would be, I would be placing some topics before you and you can tackle them from the point of view of you being a Bhagavatam scholar, an author, the objective thinking person, so on and so forth. So, are you ready? Thank you.
I think I won’t be commenting so much but I will be responding to your comments and I hope this can lead to a good discussion. Yes, please. Okay, we will begin with seeing an animal like an elephant shot by poachers, maybe unsuccessfully.
Again, approaching humans, feeling that, oh, they could help me. So, a very simple question to begin with like an appetiser. Do animals have feelings? And how can a Bhagavatam student understand them? Yes.
Now, this is one of my favourite verses for approaching contemporary issues from a spiritual perspective is in the 11th Canto, Uddhava Gita, where Krishna says that we can understand the truths of life in four ways. So, the idea is that all these are ways by which we can understand what scripture is, what the truths of life are. So, one of them is scripture, other is our own experience, but then another is inference and the other is historical anecdotes.
So, that means we can learn from our experience, our intelligence, other’s experience and from scriptural wisdom. So, that’s a very integrative way of looking at things. And from empirical, from the scriptural perspective, yes, all living beings have feelings because all living beings are conscious beings.
And even from empirical perspective, people who have pets, they know that pets do have emotions. In fact, I read one article about why people love dogs so much. They say that for many people, dogs are the nearest sources of unconditional love.
That means when you come back from office to home, your spouse or your kids may or may not be happy to see you, but your dog jumps up and down in joy, comes and leaps into your lap and kisses you. One person is happy to see you. So, if people, if you feel loved by animals, that means they are themselves experiencing something and that’s how we are experiencing in return.
So, definitely animals do have feelings and I think hardly anyone would deny the fact that animals have feelings. What are your thoughts about it? Are there people who, you think logically or rationally, people who would really deny animals have feelings? I would say that sometimes when people have their so-called religious dogma come in the way, and I’m being very clear about that, human beings have dominion over other animals. Man’s needs are, how you can say, man’s needs are primary or man’s needs are not primary.
Man’s needs are predominant over the needs of every other species. So that kind of numbs us. We know, as you rightly said, that we can use all these pramanas to understand animals to have feelings.
But when it comes to our economic needs, for sure, we will not pay heed to anything. And there are also political reasons. For example, Norway has never agreed to a whale ban.
Japan has never agreed to a, again, tuna fishing. So, some countries which are not relegated to the lower ranks economically, but per capita income, they are among the top rankers. They are part of the first world.
They have very deeply entrenched social development programmes for humans there. But when it comes to animals, it’s only economics which is of prime concern. No other subject can enter into that forum and have its say.
It’s only economic growth, economic gain. And that’s why they may be feeling animals are feeling, but when it comes to economic benefits, they’re ready to just push aside everything else and only let economic brain rule the way they function. Yes, I think this is an important point.
And so it’s more of a philosophically or logically, not many people will deny that animals have feelings, but when it comes to financial aspects, we may objectify them. So interestingly, even those religious dogmas which make a radical difference between humans and animals, actually, what they say is animals don’t have souls. But that doesn’t mean animals don’t have feelings.
So there’s a very interesting difference that they make, that basically, this is not even a Christian idea. This is more of an idea that came from Greek philosophy, which is imported into Christianity. Basically, Thomas Aquinas propagated it.
So he said that there are three kinds of souls. There are vegetative souls, there are sentient souls, and there are rational souls. The vegetative souls are present in plants, sentient souls are present in animals, and rational souls are present in humans.
And only rational souls are capable of knowing God and being delivered by God. So we don’t see consciousness as one integral property of the soul. There are different degrees of consciousness.
So animals also, according to them, they have sentient souls. So they have feelings. But animals don’t have the rational faculty to enquire about life’s spiritual side.
And that’s why they are considered to be of a lower level. So what I understand is that there is a difference in degree in consciousness between humans and animals. That’s the Vedic perspective.
But what is the difference in degree? Some religious dogmas hold it as a difference in category. So it’s not that there’s categorical difference between humans and animals in terms of the kind of soul present. It’s the same soul, but at different degrees of evolution of consciousness.
Do they agree that animals may have, like the vegetative souls can have a higher degree of consciousness later? Is that a possibility? Well, it seems that many modern Christians, although Christianity is a very diverse religion. So modern Christians, some of them are quite eco, they’re quite environmentally conscious. And now science has also indicated that animals do have feelings.
And plants also have feelings, at least in the sense that they respond to our feelings to some extent. Plant growth is affected by the kind of emotions we experience, the kind of actions that we do. So the blanket rejection of feelings is not there now.
But how to place that within a philosophical context? Because they have only one life. So there is no chance for, say, plants to evolve to human consciousness. Of course, the Pope made some, I think it was Pope John Paul II had made some news.
He said that if a dog is a, do dogs go to heaven? That is a question that was raised to him. So he said, if the dogs are faithful to a faithful Christian, then the dog will also go to heaven. So then you’ll be united with dogs in heaven.
So I think it’s a, if we go into the technicalities of the philosophy, it will be different. But there’s no idea of, say, the soul evolving from one body to another body. So in that sense, vegetable, vegetative souls getting higher consciousness is something which I don’t see as being compatible with their philosophical understanding.
Okay, should we move on? Yes. So if there was a sizable percentage of the audience, which was very angry with the poachers or the hunters. And so there is this, my common sense is a small difference.
Poachers generally are local people. If it is Swaziland or Namibia or Congo or Kenya or Mozambique, local people are the poachers and they just, they might just cut up that particular limb of the animal, which they could sell for a high price. Hunters could be the people who hunt for sport.
They could be tourists. They could be money people coming all from the first world, paying a hefty licence fee and then hunting. So here is the second point for our discussion.
Should hunting be universally banned? Like if it is reducing the number of wild animals which are necessary for the habitat to be sustained, then should it be banned? Now, in our context, when we are discussing from a Vedic point of view, we do have descriptions of kings engaging in hunting called Mrigaya. So first the overall understanding whether it should be banned and then the Vedic point of view on that. What could be your say on that? Yeah, interesting.
I also looked up the difference between poaching and hunting. So it seems the basic difference is that hunting is according to the law. So the law may regulate which animals can be killed, which time of the season or time of the year or time of the day they can be killed.
How many one person can kill, in which area they can kill. So when it’s all regulated by government law, that’s what is called as hunting. And when it’s not regulated by law, it’s called poaching.
It’s something similar to people having bars where alcoholic drinks are sold legally and having illegal selling of drinks. It’s an interesting difference. Now, hunting was definitely a part of the traditional Vedic culture.
It was there. And from what I can see, there is broadly three factors for hunting. One is, of course, safety that the sages living in the forest and if the animals come into there, animals trouble them, animals terrorise them, then it is the duty of the king to protect the Brahmanas.
So the sages are Brahmanas. So one is protection simply, defence, safety or protection. Second is also, this can seem a little controversial, it is said to be training that animals, Kshatriyas have to fight and they have to hone their skills for fighting.
So how do they hone their skills? It is by hunting. So there is some amount of training for fighting involved and so they have to immunise themselves to the sight of blood and violence. Only so much can be done in a non-life settings.
You can have simulations, two people fighting with each other as a mock fighting. But that’s the second purpose. And third is even more rare, that was for sacrifices.
There was the idea that sacrifice basically meant that which is valuable for us, we offer that to a higher power or higher being. But what animals would they choose to kill? Like if you say it is for honing their Kshatriya skills, was there a restriction on that too? Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, you can also add on these points, but it does seem that these third had certain amount of restrictions, which animals can be used, which animals cannot be used for sacrifices.
I am not sure about the second being that regulated, because there are examples of if you see Maharaj Pandu, when he mistakenly attacks a sage who is actually like an animal form, that animal seems to be in a relatively harmless form, like that animal form is in a harmless form, not in a really aggressive form like a lion or a tiger. It was a deer. It was a deer.
That’s what I also thought. So, but I’m sure you can add some things on this. What are your thoughts about this? Yeah, I also feel that the world is known as Jagat.
It always mutates, always evolves. So, what could be seen as an integrated part of a warrior’s training that is going on would be to test his skill as a warrior, as you rightly said, to hone his skills, to desensitise him upon the sight of blood, violence and flesh. But then, I mean, I’m not trying to be picky on this, but the British King who would come to India, at least there is one king who came, so that hunt would be the three to four hundred people going with drums and then they would, whether it is the Assam jungles for hunting elephants or rhinos or tigers or whatever, and then they would kind of fan out and then they would try to put these animals into one particular corner and then the king would shoot him from the back of an elephant.
So, I don’t think that has the same value in honing your skill where, say, you are just having a dagger and then you are having a tiger in front of you. It’s one on one. It is the king of the outside world with the king of the forest, so to say.
So, what really appealed to me is that this is where on a one-on-one basis, a warrior tries to show that he is capable of ruling. So, that Mrigaya, that hunt is totally different from what we see in the last two, three centuries. So, these are some technical… Yes, whatever I have heard about the kind of hunting that is done in today’s world or what was done not in today’s world, a few hundred years ago also, it was basically odds were not at all fair.
There might be some level of skill, but like a large number of humans cornering an animal and then killing it. So, in that sense, there might be some skill involved in it, but it is not really comparable with what was done in the Vedic times. So, some amount of principles might be… There might be some similarities, but there are huge amount of differences.
And I don’t think in today’s world, with the kind of weapons that are used for warfare, hunting will train anyone for preparing for war at all. Isn’t it? Yeah, you hardly have any president personally fighting the president of another country. It is more or less done through proxies and you are safe in your own bunker.
You are just ordering everybody to fight and sacrifice their lives for motherland or whatever. There was something like a president still. The question would be that, or even if it is not a president, even if it is a soldier or a general, but the war has become a very different kind of game now.
If at all we want to use the word game. So, with the kind of technology that is used, with the kind of strategies that are used, that hunting would not prepare people for fighting. So, in my understanding, just like there is a tradition of polygamy in the Vedic scriptures.
So, it is there, but that is not what is recommended today. So, similarly, there are things which can be explained in their context as being intelligible, as being reasonable, but they don’t have to be applied in today’s context. So, one positive point was raised by the commenters there that hunting can also be used as a fundraising strategy for conservation of the same species.
Like you allow, if it is gazelle or wildebeest or rhinos or whatever, 10 rhinos are allowed in a whole year, the licence are given and the people who pay for that, with that money, there could be more forests preserved for rhinos. So, have you heard of this or would you like to say it is a big positive? Yeah, so that is, in some countries, they have made it that whatever earnings come from the selling of alcohol, a portion of it has to be channelled for research to cure diseases coming from alcohol. Okay.
So, now that might seem funny or it might seem silly also, but the point is that there are vices which people are going to succumb. So, you succumb to those vices and, but at least the extreme effects of those vices can be minimised. There is, you know, there is, I read it, there are three levels.
There is like banning or elimination. Then there is regulation. And there is, you could say, condemnation.
So, the difference is more in terms of, say, banning is like a legally stopping, regulation is also legal, whereas condemnation is more ethical or moral. So, one of the challenges, I’ve been studying a little bit of political philosophy recently. So, one of the challenges in political philosophy is that, is everything immoral to be made illegal? Or can certain immoral things be considered legal? Okay.
So, for example, infidelity. So, now, at least in today’s world, it’s the idea that somebody, somebody, they’re having consent and they can do whatever they want. It is, most people still consider it, especially after marriage, to be wrong, but it’s not a legally culpable crime.
So, there is immoral and there is illegal. And even illegal also, we could say that something which is, so, hunting, with respect to legality, at least there is some amount of recognition that poaching is wrong. That means without authorisation, if you kill, that is wrong.
But some people do have that nature, that tendency. So, I think this could be one way to make the best of a bad bargain. But, so, in some ways, attempts to legally ban things have not really worked in recent human history.
In America, they had the prohibition movement where they tried to ban alcohol and all that it led to was alcohol going underground. Yeah. So, do you have any examples of banning things or banning what is accepted as bad? So, as something which is worked? Well, this is the, as I said, the million dollar issue that the moment something is banned, say a book or a film, and there is an overwhelming urge to find out why it is banned.
Yes. And so, there is an urge which kind of borders on a little bit of rebellion or a little bit of trying not to, or the glee that you are breaking some law. Government says, don’t do that.
No, I’ll do it because I have my freedom. So, the urge versus the taste. That’s how I put it.
Krishna introduced in the Bhagavad Gita, the idea of there is a param drishtva, when you relish a higher taste, only then can you give up the lower ones. And Prabhupada used it for anytime there could be a dialogue, conversation, interview with reporters or scholars about alcohol abuse, about crime, about drugs, about practically everything. Prabhupada would use a solid sledgehammer of a point that because this is not during Prabhupada’s time, one decade at least later, Ronald Reagan and his wife, she was not a politician, but she started this slogan, just say no, because it came from the first lady.
It was a highly touted and a government funded programme. Millions of dollars were spent in pamphlets and programmes, and they were telling the kids, whenever a beggar or a senior in your class or somebody mistreats you or offers you drugs, just say no. So, how can it work when there is no higher taste? So, you are saying that what is the difference between urge and taste? So, you’re saying that urge cannot be removed unless the taste has been reformed.
Yes. So, just telling you to halt your urge or stop it, like a very intellectual kind of a programme, especially fear-based, the authority insists that if you do this, you’ll be punished. But still people keep on doing it.
Why? Because the urge is simply too great. Yeah. While Krishna explains in the Bhagavad Gita that if you only take higher taste and that he explains through your spiritual growth, that will enable you to give up other base ideas or other base tastes.
True, true. So, we understood what kings used to do and I’ll just take another thread of this one thing. So, what about somebody saying hunt only if you want to eat and that could be true for a, I would say a sizable percentage of the world’s population, may not be very big, but still a sizable, indigenous people living in their own territories and hunting animals, which they have hunted for the last millennia, so to say.
Yes, that’s a very valid point that when we talk about say the four regulative principles in our tradition, we see that there is a description of people who don’t follow these regulative principles and there is no like a condemnation of that. So, for example, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu meets a fisherman or a fisherman is there in this kind of traditional tamil, who while fishing, actually in his fishing net, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is there because Chaitanya Mahaprabhu jumped into the ocean. So, now there is no condemnation of that fisherman that he was such a fallen person or something like that in the description.
So, it does seem that the four regulative principles were recommended to be followed and they were followed by the Brahmanas in general and there were people who were also accepted within society in their own places who did not follow those things. So, yes, the whole idea would be that if there are indigenous people and they are hunting, the way they hunt is going to be very, very different from say the way people today might hunt. And especially if we consider even among meat eating, the bigger problem is not just eating meat.
It is the industrialisation and commercialisation of the meat packing industry, wherein the animals are bred specifically to be killed. And in a sense, the animals have no chance, no choice. They live in a trapped condition and then they live in an unnatural environment and then they are killed, slaughtered.
So, that is very disruptive for the ecosystem. But if some indigenous people have been living for a long time in a particular place, then the ecosystem functions that way. So, they are not going to mass slaughter animals.
They are not going to use super sophisticated weapons. So, in that sense, there is one issue of killing and there is another issue of say disruptive killing. Jivo jivasya jeevanam is just a fact of life.
As the Bhagavatam says, one form of life will kill other forms of life. So, but it is disruptive killing is what is the big problem. I think in today’s hunting or industrialised animal slaughter, that is very disruptive and destructive.
Any thoughts about this? Oh, very good. Yeah, you practically covered all the aspects of especially the indigenous people and their practise of killing. So, now this is a funny thing.
What if there should be a law which tags poachers just like we have elephants who are tagged with a small chip and they could be traced whenever they are in the forest. So, if somebody has broken the rule, broken the law and is a known poacher, so he should also be embedded with a chip in his shoulder or somewhere so that whenever he is around in the forest and if he is doing some kind of illegal poaching, that could be so. So, this is a point from the human rights point of view that can we treat a human poacher on par with animals like animals are tagged.
This particular human being is also tagged. Will that be infringement? Any thoughts on that? Maybe we could have, I just mentioned a few points here, but maybe we could have a separate podcast on the ethics of artificial intelligence. That’s a big subject.
So, if we use artificial intelligence for surveillance, so for example, if we insert chips, so to what extent for what purposes is that acceptable? I think there was George Orwell in 1984 where he talks about how every single moment, every single word that you are speaking, even your privacy, that is monitored by the government, the big brother, as it is called. The big brother is watching you. The big brother is watching you.
So, it seems recently China did that during the COVID epidemic that to monitor who has COVID and whether those COVID people are actually living in isolation or not, they implanted chips. Now, the information coming out of China, how much is true, how much is an exaggeration, how much is like a distortion, we don’t know. But once you start that, where do we stop? Each government might decide that, okay, this is a bad activity.
And therefore, for this, we should insert chips. So, there are something like, you could say natural human rights. And does any government have the right to infringe on that? I was telling about studying about political science.
So, I read a quote and then I found something similar in Chanakya’s Arthashastra. So, I’ll paraphrase that. What he says is that when making a law, don’t just consider what good it will do in the hands of good people.
Also consider what bad it will do in the hands of bad people. Interesting. Very interesting.
So, the idea is that, I would be a little apprehensive about doing something like that. Poaching is bad, no doubt. But where do you stop this then? Tomorrow, now with the political correctness going haywire.
So, it’s going overboard. So, anybody who makes a politically incorrect comment, would you want to implant chips in all those people also? So, it can become quite extreme. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, same thing here that I had this point, but your paraphrasing of that Chanakya quote really rounded up very well.
That something if it is good in the hands of good people. And again today, with the whole atmosphere initiated by so many wedges being driven between even intellectuals, how do you define good? The right will say, okay, this is what is good. The left will say, no, this is what is good.
The liberal would say something else. The centrist would say, no, no, let us have some balance. So, good and bad also have become so many shades of colours in between.
So, correct. You cannot have this kind of a thing which can be misused. So, then one person, I hope he commented in jest or it’s a sarcastic comment like, let’s make hunting poachers a sport.
That means if you know a certain area, and that is true in Africa, where wildlife officers, their lives are in danger because they are the first ones to be hit by the poacher. The poachers seem to have advanced rifles and stock of ammunition plus fast vehicles. So, many times those who are doing their lawful duty of protecting animals from the poachers get killed by the poachers themselves first.
So, therefore, this angry comment that make hunting poachers a sport, of course, no country would agree to that. But then there are also not many stringent laws which recommend heavy either fines or jail sentences for poaching. The law also is kind of weak.
So, that is there. There was a case of a Bollywood celebrity attacking some animal and then something. Nothing happened after that.
Basically, he got away without much account or without much consequence for that. So, going back to that earlier point of ethical condemnation, legal regulation and legal banning. So, there are certain things that is the law that is required.
But I like to put this as the fear of consequence and the power of conscience. There are two different things. Ethical is with respect to the power of conscience.
So, for many people, if actually they either interact with animals personally or they interact with or they even observe the kind of videos where we see animals interacting personally with people, that itself can trigger their conscience. I am currently here in the Govardhanika village and I have been told that many people who come here, at least some people who come here and they spend some time with the cows. If Western people do that, many of them going back to say, I’m not going to eat beef anymore.
So, they may not give up meat eating per se, but they start sensing that just like Western people, they will not think of eating dog flesh or cat flesh because they’ve interacted with dogs and cats at a personal level and they see them as persons. Similarly, they interact with cows. So, at one level, the same thing happens when they see how cows is actually such a loving, gentle person, basically a personal being.
So, I think that there is the legal aspect of it, which maybe it’s not immediately in our control, but to some extent, the power of conscience can be awakened both from one to one interaction with animals as well as a philosophical understanding of the nature of life and how consciousness is present in everyone. True. Now, we come to a kind of an abstract point.
Now, this will weigh heavily on our borrowing from our Bhagavad Gita, Chitra Sarthamrit that it is such a tragedy that humans have such little respect for any life. Now, it means we don’t have respect for even human life, like even human death just becomes statistics or we don’t care whether, like now in the pandemic situation, we are seeing the thousands and thousands. It is just a kind of statistic.
So, when we have lost our respect for human life, how can we possibly increase or expand our love circle, which also brings in animals in that circle? Is there a possibility? If it is, then what is the way towards coming to that level of feeling respect for all life? Oh, this is like, I would say to some extent, a popular sport among people to imagine counterfactuals. You know, a few years ago, there was an Australian cricketer, not a top-notch cricketer, but like an upcoming cricketer who was hit by a bouncer and he was killed. So, he died at that time.
So, then there was so much concern and sympathy and all that came up. So, there were a lot of people saying only if we had so much concern for domestic violence, if we only had so much concern for human trafficking, if we had so much concern for the environment, if we had so much concern for this or that. So, there is a phrase called, it’s called riding your favourite ideological hobby horse.
Okay. That is, you know, everybody has some cause that they champion. And whenever we see somebody championing for any cause, okay, you know, that’s good, but why not have that same emotional energy for this? So, my understanding is that what cause might trigger people’s imagination and evoke some sense of outrage or evoke some sense of protest.
We don’t know, but if something is happening, if something bad is happening and that is evoking protest, that is an indication of consciousness rising or expanding. And whichever way it rises, it is good. So, if it is with respect to animals being killed, like with respect to this particular incident where an elephant was wounded by a human and came to a human for help, whether it is for some other cause, whether it is say domestic violence, whether it is against this cause or that cause, sometimes some things capture the human imagination.
Then the refugees are coming and so there’s some refugees that were both capsized in Europe and then their bodies were seen and that created a sympathy for the refugees’ plight. Or in some cases, there could be the victims of terrorist attacks or whatever. So, I feel whichever way sympathy or empathy or concern for something bigger than oneself is awakened, that is good.
And now at the same time, the Bhagavad Gita, the bhakti tradition, yoga tradition offers us a systematic process for broadening our consciousness. And so sometimes because of sociocultural causes, consciousness might expand and that is good if it expands. But there is also a systematic process by which consciousness will expand.
And the Gita says that the topmost spiritualists are also having the greatest empathy. Atma upamye sarvatra, samam pashyati arjuna, sukham va yadi va dukkham, sayogi parmo mataha. That those topmost yogis see everyone equally like themselves in terms of their happiness and distress.
So, we could say that the sporadic expansion of consciousness and there is a systematic expansion of consciousness. So, we appreciate the sporadic expansion of consciousness that is happening wherever. And then we also, we also present or emphasise the process for systematic expansion of consciousness.
Any thoughts? Yeah. So, finally, it comes to that thing which is not very popular, but I mean, not very popular intellectually, but socially this word is becoming very widespread. Somebody just said the people who did this to the animals or the poachers or people who don’t, not for conservation of the environment.
I hope karma gets them. So, although the law of karma is not universally understood as it is explained in Gita, but the word karma has gone universal for sure. So, let’s say when a practitioner of bhakti yoga, he kind of tells somebody who is a non-practitioner or whatever.
I hope karma gets you. So, is it like a, what would I say? Is it like a curse word? Is it like telling him of a universal law or just alerting him to something which could happen? That’s a very good question. Although, as he rightly said, karma is not accepted by many people, but still there is this idea that we can use karma to get back at the people whom we disapprove of.
So, it seems liberals in the West are more open to using terminology from other sides, but in the recent US election with immense polarisation, I have seen in the coverage both sides using that karma has got back to you, karma has got back to you. So, it seems that the liberals with their president, they are going to get the president it seems, but the conservatives are getting the houses of the parliament. So, both sides have seen them use that word.
So, karma has sometimes become like a tool in the cultural wars to condemn those whom we disapprove of. So, karma is going to, we will all be accountable for our karma, but I think that using philosophy like this or a philosophical term like this without proper understanding, well, you say, you hope karma will get them. Well, independent of your hope or not hoping karma, karma is going to act in its own way.
And it does seem to be quite a heartless way of looking at things. That is my main concern with it. It becomes like somehow I hope the law gets that person, doesn’t seem as judgemental or as vindictive.
And I hope karma gets you. It seems to be more of a personal agenda. It’s like I want to have vigilante justice.
If I can’t do it, karma will do it. Something like that. Do you get that sense when you hear that kind of usage? Yes, yes, yes.
That’s why I asked you. So, we touched diverse points. So, should I just summarise the points? Yeah, that would be wonderful.
But are there any other, I had one thought which I would like to… Yeah, please go ahead. If you have something independent of these eight, nine points, you can have it. So, there is this, there is an increase in awareness of animal consciousness, which is seen, say, for example, in the vegan movement also.
In fact, I read a news where recently in Thanksgiving, there are special plates which are prepared, which look like salads, but they are beef and steak and meat. So, the idea is that it has become, if you are eating meat, you are condemned for that in some social circles, not in the mainstream American society, but in some social circles. So, how you can mask your meat eating by having meat in a form which doesn’t look like meat.
So, the respectable way of eating meat in a vegan society, something like that. That was the title of the article. So, the point I was making is that everything, there is, when something happens good, there is always the danger of overdoing it.
And just like environmental consciousness itself can become like a religion in itself. And it can also become extreme sometimes. So, sometimes animal consciousness can also become extreme in itself.
So, concern is good, but obsession is unhealthy. And I think this is the danger in the modes of passion and ignorance that we can go to extremes. So, there is the principle in the Vedic scriptures, I would like you to comment on also that comparatively speaking, human life is considered to be more valuable than animal life.
Not because we humans, because we have made the laws, but rather from the perspective of the purpose of existence, human life is more conducive for spiritual evolution. So, there is a distinctive strand of misanthropy, where some people say that humans are a curse on the planet. And if humans are eliminated, the planet would be so much better.
So, now when people say this, more often than not, they’re not thinking of killing themselves. So, I would say that concern for animals doesn’t have to lead to misanthropy, to hatred for humans. So, I feel it goes in that direction.
Normally, if somebody will say humans should be killed, that’s like calling for genocide, that would be contempt. But if somebody says, environment has been so much damaged by humans, so the world would be better off if humans are killed. That just evokes some laugh.
And it depends on the context, but I feel that that is a danger, that just as there are some humans who attack that elephant and who do poaching, so there are also humans who are concerned about it. And rather than painting humans in a negative brush, we need to recognise that there are shades of grey, and there is black and white everywhere. And it’s more of not demonising humans, not deifying animals either, but it’s more of recognising everybody’s place and purpose in the universe and giving everybody that space.
Any thoughts on this? Yeah, nicely summarised. So, should I just go through the points? Do you have anything else to add? No, no. So, today we have this interesting thing.
We will have this video at the beginning of our podcast. And we began with trying to understand how the animals have feelings, what does it mean to be an animal? And then we discussed about hunting, how in the Vedic age, it was the identity of a warrior, honing his skills and being sensitised to seeing blood, violence, war during times of warfare, highly contrasted with today’s so-called warriors or leaders, where there is no hand-to-hand combat. And even the hunting, which in the last two or three hundred years, kings would do, would be like a solidly supported endeavour.
Three to four hundred people quarrelling animals into one small corner and then the king shooting them. So, that cannot be compared with the function of hunting in the olden ages. Then, can somebody hunt only to eat like the indigenous people all over the world? And not for a trophy.
So, they have their right, they are doing this for the last so many years. They should be allowed because, used a very nice sentence that they are not destructively using hunting. They have this as part of their culture, they don’t do anything else.
And the very fact that their region has survived, it alludes to the fact that this hunting is properly controlled and it’s not destructive or disruptive. We also talked about whether poachers should be tagged, just like using artificial intelligence. So, you said that we can have this as a subject for another podcast.
Surely, it’s a very interesting thing. Then, hoping karma gets them. That was one point.
So, we came to the understanding that we don’t wish ill on someone or we don’t control karma. So, somebody is not in a power to, they may get karma whether we wish or not. But this idea that I hope the law gets you, as you rightly said, it’s a much milder way of putting things and I hope karma gets you.
And finally, the respect for animal life. We don’t need to be misanthropic. Actually, I forget the name of this biology professor who actually has a discipline saying that we should all commit suicide.
And humans. And only then this planet will actually nicely fructify, multiply, remain stable, because humans should just remove themselves from the picture. That would be the biggest good they could be doing.
So, this is another extreme way of thinking. And it certainly borders on misanthropy, that we love ourselves. That is one extreme.
And we hate ourselves, existentially. So, you brought up that point of misanthropy. So, any last minute things, or last comments you would like to add? Thank you.
I think this is very well structured and we discussed a lot of perspectives. And I feel that this way of discussing where we take contemporary issues, not necessarily from the contemporary mainstream media, but we could also take from the social media or the contemporary issues and see. I think one point, wherever there is a sporadic expansion of consciousness, we can appreciate that, even when it has manifested through some social media.
And then we can also offer a systematic process for expanding consciousness. And that way, we can move forward. Yes.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.