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[Guest guest]

The Island Friday 17th October 2003

www.island.lk

 

Generating more and more cruel livelihoods

 

Sri Lanka is generating more and more cruel livelihoods, from contract

killings of other humans to cruel slaughter of hundreds of animals at one

session, all for money. The Fifth Step of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path

is Right Livelihood — to refrain from selling flesh, rear animals for

slaughter, producing arms, poison, intoxicating drugs/liquor. However hard

our Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, try to prove otherwise, an animal

has an acute sense of feeling, just like us. How can a " Buddhist " country

start and encourage fattening of animals for slaughter?

 

The TV is full of tempting offers of aid to those who take up this business,

while advertisements inviting to gorge on more and more animals parts abound.

 

Export of flesh, started by the previous regime, is continued with gusto by

the present one. Battery hen farming, banned in most countries, has been

initiated here.

 

The cruelty these creatures undergo is unbelievable.

 

The Buddha speaks of Ditthadhammavedeniya kamma as the volitional activity

that can produce some of its vipaka resultant effects in this life itself.

We heard of a man having a vast prawn farm, where the prawns were

disembowelled alive before export.

 

The owner’s end was a cancer that rotted away his intestines. Not all the

money he had earned from his prawn farm could shorten his lingering and

agonising death. The eyes of the female prawn are plucked out, first one and

after an interval, the other, to make her produce more eggs in a frenzy,

after which she is sold for consumption. We hear whispers of a promoter of

the business, whose eye has already been knocked out.

 

Can anybody believe there actually exists a Buddha Sasana Ministry? Not to

mention those who are so lamentably failing in their duty of advising the

so-called leaders, and who yet remain wrapped in the robe of the Master,

whose first precept is compassion towards all living beings.

 

The Buddha-word is that nobody and nothing can prosper in happiness on the

suffering of other beings. Look around for proof!

 

This mass production of cruelty, suffering and slaughter does not affect

only those who cause it, but spills over the entire island, making it

progressively more rotten and engulfing all of us, who watch in silence,

without making the slightest move to prevent it. Where are the animal lovers

and the Buddhists?

 

 

Prema Ranawaka Das

Moratuwa

 

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