“When one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic.”
The above quote, attributed to Joseph Stalin, is unfortunately the way we view death and tragedy. How would this quote hold up when applied to animals, you wonder? If one dog’s death catches the attention of popular media, it is undoubtedly tragic; when millions of chickens, pigs, cows and other animals are killed on a daily basis, it is not only just a statistic, but a statistic that does not even warrant consideration, no matter how vast.
As per the Sample Registration System Baseline Survey 2014 , 29 percent of Indians over the age of 15 were vegetarians. The remaining 71 percent identified themselves as non-vegetarians.
What of the people who abstain completely from animal and animal-derived products i.e. vegans? Where do vegans come into the picture? In a country where almost 350 million people identify themselves as vegetarians, presumably due to a combination of religious beliefs and their perceived sense of wrong in killing animals, the percentage of vegans isn’t even sufficient enough to merit a place in the survey.
This shortage is partly due to people’s lack of awareness regarding the horrors in the dairy industry and their disconnect from the abuse and exploitation of animals, largely due to society’s conditioning where certain animals are viewed as sport, food, their hides and fur used as clothing, etc. while other animals are viewed as man’s best friend or simply too cute to kill.