Nepal Low on Sacrificial Goats

Don’t you just hate it when this happens?

You’ve got your holy water, your religious costumes, your hymns all picked out, and everything ready. Then you get the altar all set up, your knife all sharpened—and you realize you forgot the sacrificial goat!

Right now, Kathmandu, Nepal is suffering a shortage of goats to sacrifice. The upcoming Hindu festival of Dashain features a ritual slaughter—and consumption—of goats and other animals in honor of the goddess Durga. With the city short on goat supply, actual government officials are sending out goat scouts to find more goats to kill from the countryside.

They’re also asking farmers to sell their livestock for the festival in rural areas, as well as for anyone who has a goat to sell it for the festival. (Some advice, guys—don’t call Rob Schneider. He got super pissed when Adam Sandler took his goat.)

And how many goats are needed, you might ask? Isn’t sacrificing one goat enough?

Nay, says the government of Kathmandu; approximately 6,000 goats are being sought after to literally serve their country.

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? First of all, killing anything in the name of religion seems so, I don’t know—stone age? At what point did we decide that sacrificing virgins to volcanoes wasn’t cool anymore but goats and chickens were still fair game?

Secondly, bringing in more animals—and killing them—because there aren’t enough already to kill seems sort of counterproductive. Would Durga not be happy with, say, a goat-breeding ritual instead this year to up the population a bit for next year’s festival?

I’m not a Hindu, so maybe it’s not so fair for me to judge… but aren’t cows sacred to Hindu people? And if so, why is killing goats okay if cows are given the right-of-way? Every mainstream religion seems to have some weird laws—or at least guidelines—on how and what to eat when it comes to flesh-bearing food, and none of them make sense to me—not just the Hindu beliefs here.

Still, as much as mainstream religion confounds me these days, particularly with Christianity’s political involvement, at least they aren’t sacrificing animals in the name of Jesus—or, not to my knowledge they’re not, anyway (though didn’t Jesus’ parents sacrifice a couple of doves? And then there was that whole lamb thing with the plagues…).