What we now call mob rule or mobocracy is nothing new. Nor is this cruelty directed only at people: animals, birds, trees, hills, soil and rivers are not spared human brutality either, and it grows acute in certain situations. Just as people kill other people for no reason or for trivial reasons, beating them to death, beheading them or burning them alive, they also treat animals and birds brutally for no reason.

Animals and birds cannot speak, have no conflict of interest with people and do them little harm. Yet we kill them at will, treat them cruelly, cage them, abandon them, injure them, burn them to death and even subject them to mob beatings. Because people are not punished for this persecution, they have grown more violent by the day. Now one person can easily kill another. Mobocracy is born of this mindset, and it is growing by taking advantage of the weak rule of law.

Two years ago, for example, villagers in Ranishankail, Thakurgaon, spotted a nilgai running about near homes and began to chase it. The nearly extinct wild animal eventually collapsed on the ground, kicking its legs, and about 10 villagers held it down and cut its throat. Why did the villagers have to do this monstrous thing? Why did a harmless animal have to be slaughtered?

That is not all. In the country's various zoos, known as torture cells for wildlife, animals and birds are handled inhumanely and kept in harsh conditions. I have written before about the suffering of animals at the National Zoo, where reports described people's shameless behaviour towards them. Some people behaved so vilely towards pregnant monkeys that they were forced to hide in a corner of their cage.

The practice of beating people to death, the habit of pouring hot water on dogs and cats, hacking them with sharp objects, breaking their legs or poisoning their food are all of a piece. So we must not forget that none of us, you or I, is safe from people who kill animals.

The Wildlife Crime Control Unit and the social forestry department rescued 122 wild animals in two phases from an illegal zoo at Swapnapuri park in Dinajpur. The seized animals included hoolock gibbons, an Asiatic bear, capped langurs, great hornbills, slow lorises, otters and a number of snakes and turtles. They had been kept so badly that some were found physically injured, which shows how "comfortably" they had been kept. They were simply exhibited for business, without care.

Countless dead turtles are washing up at different points on the Cox's Bazar beach. Researchers say they are olive ridley turtles. Why are turtles dying or washing up dead like this in the breeding season, and who is responsible? We are, meaning people. The chief executive of the voluntary environmental organisation Environment People told the media: "Dead turtles are being found every year in the breeding season, with injury marks on their bodies. When turtles get caught in fishing nets fixed in the sea, fishermen kill them by beating them with sticks or striking them with sharp weapons and throw them into the sea."

The rise in turtle deaths in the breeding season has worried researchers, who say it indicates the destruction of their breeding grounds. The sea turtle breeding season runs from November to March, when mother turtles come to the coast to lay eggs. Many die then, caught in fishermen's nets or hit by large vessels at sea. Friendly animals such as dolphins are not safe from us either, and are dying for various reasons and washing ashore. Their nesting sites have become risky for many reasons: unplanned houses and hotels are going up along the shore and there is more light on the beach. Abandoned nets thrown into the sea, beach diving, games and walking on the beach in the nesting season, and illegal current nets fixed on the beach are also destroying the turtles' nesting environment. Mother turtles also die caught in trawl nets in the deep sea.

Even when turtles manage to lay eggs on the beach, the eggs cannot be protected: dogs eat them, and packs of dogs attack mother turtles as soon as they come ashore to lay. Nesting sites are steadily shrinking. Making fishermen aware, creating a safe environment at nesting sites and keeping dogs off the beach are urgent, or the turtles cannot be saved. The conditions that let them come ashore to lay and return to the deep sea are now being disrupted. We cannot protect these helpless animals' right to live and lay eggs safely, because we do not recognise their right to live.

People eat so many things over a lifetime, yet their greed does not go away. I have heard that in areas near the Sundarbans in Khulna and Satkhira, deer meat is still served at weddings, as a special demand from the groom's side. Migratory birds come to our country to escape extreme cold, and we kill them just to eat their meat. The sight of small, beautifully coloured birds makes people want to eat them. Who can say that people like these are not killing children or committing rape?

A mobile court fined a restaurant in Haripur, Jaintiapur, Sylhet, for selling bird meat, and 150 birds of various species were seized from refrigerators at several other restaurants. Some restaurants in these areas have been accused of selling the meat of various local and foreign birds for years in violation of the wildlife law and a government ban. Hotel owners secretly buy the birds from local hunting gangs, and the hunters, greedy for big profits at little cost, kill the birds with poisoned bait, which is a serious threat to public health.

Recently, many birds killed with poisoned bait were found on a char of the Padma river in Rajshahi, and some had been washed away in the river. Members of a voluntary organisation recovered a total of 41 migratory birds of various species, including eagles, black kites, tilihash and piyong ducks. They found 41 dead birds lying on a single char and were bewildered to see so many.

Do the "bird-eating" customers of hotels and restaurants know that they are relishing birds that died of poisoning? A bird hunter, Liton, has admitted that they lay poisoned bait on the Padma chars at night. The birds die after eating it, and in the morning the dead birds are collected and their throats cut on the char. They are then supplied to hotels and restaurants in the city. So that no one would suspect him, Liton went into the river with a current net pretending to fish, but his real work was killing birds with poisoned bait. Flocks of migratory birds come to the Padma chars in Rajshahi every winter.

Man is the cruellest creature on this earth. Because Bangladesh's wildlife protection law is not very effective, this killing goes on freely. People in this country kill animals and birds not only to eat them, but also for revenge, pleasure or fun. A few years ago in Rajbari, a horse had its four legs tied and was brutally killed by having bamboo sticks inserted into its anus and urethra. The enmity was really with the horse's owner, but it was the horse that had to die.

Some time ago, street dogs and cats were poisoned at Japan Garden City in Mohammadpur in the capital. These animals live on scraps that people give them; they eat when they get food and go hungry when they do not. Have they ever snatched food from a person? Probably not; no such news has come to my notice. Yet one day someone like you or me called them with food. The animals trusted them and came forward, and that food became their last, because it was laced with poison. After eating it, the dogs and cats ran about in agony and died vomiting blood. This happened on 22 November at Japan Garden City in Dhaka.

Those who did this inhumane thing, and for whatever reason, are in fact killers. They would not think twice about poisoning a person if needed, and their hands would not tremble joining a mob beating to kill someone. What will children learn from guardians they have seen kill dogs and cats indiscriminately? They watched the animals writhe and die in front of everyone, yet the animals could not complain against anyone, because they have no language.

In one report the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said most serial killers in America had a history of cruelty to animals. In 1997 Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals carried out a well-known study showing that people who are cruel to animals are five times more likely to harm other people. Random shootings at schools happen often in America, and a 2013 study of such shooters found that 43 per cent of school shooters had beaten dogs and cats. (Prothom Alo)

The practice of beating people to death, pouring hot water on dogs and cats, hacking them with sharp objects, breaking their legs or poisoning their food are all of a piece. So we must not forget that none of us, you or I, is safe from people who kill animals.

18 February 2025

The writer is a communications specialist and columnist.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.