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Denis Giles

08 August 2016

Created: 08 August 2016

Last Updated: 08 August 2016

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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

My favourite Zen story is when a question is asked of a Zen monk – ‘‘A house is on fire. What is the most important thing that you would save?’’ He replies – “I would save the fire.”

This story has stayed with me for 40 years teaching me to look deeper into what we consider valuable.

Let’s talk about the single tiniest living being on the planet – the bacterium, a tiny single cell being so small that millions live together and are collectively known as bacteria. A gram of soil contains about 40 million bacterial cells. A millilitre of fresh water usually holds about one million. Earth is estimated to hold at least 5 nonillion (54 zeros!).

A bacterium is a proper being. It can communicate, travel, multiply, generate energy, understand its environment.  There are three types:  ball shaped or cocci, rod shaped or bacilli, and spiral or spirilla. They are found everywhere – from your stomach to the Arctic ice and volcanoes, the bottom of the ocean to 30 miles up in the sky. Soil, plants, animals – all of us are walking mountains of bacteria.

Some of them are extremophiles, surviving in such toxic conditions or extremes of temperature where no other being can survive.

Bacteria are the first forms of life on this planet about 4 billion years ago. You are their descendants.

They were first attempted to be identified by Marcus Terentius Varro (Roman - 116 BC-27 BC) who suggested that disease may be caused by miniscule animals that floated in the air. They were finally identified by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (Dutch 1632-1723) who made microscopes, with which he saw what he called animacules in 1676 (to be called bacteria 162 years later). He is known as the father of microbiology. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (German 1795-1876) introduced the term bacterium in 1838. Robert Koch (German 1843-1910) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1905 for proving diseases were caused by bacteria. Paul Ehrlich (German - 1854-1915) won the Nobel prize for pioneering the use of stains to detect them.

Bacteria feed themselves in a variety of ways. Some eat other organisms. Some absorb dead organic material, such as decomposing flesh. Some parasitic bacteria kill their host. Some make their own food out of sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. In fact, these helped create the oxygen atmosphere of the earth. Some use water, and chemicals such as ammonia, sulphur, phosphorus, nitrogen, zinc, iron to produce their food. We call them nitrogen fixers. They are common in plant roots.

Aerobic bacteria grow only in the presence of oxygen. They can cause corrosion and bad smells. Anaerobic bacteria can only grow if there is no oxygen present. In humans, they are most commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract. They cause gangrene, tetanus, botulism and dental infections. Some grow with or without oxygen and are found in soil, water, vegetation, humans and animals. One example is salmonella. Human bacterial infections are mainly caused by mesophilic bacteria (like ecoli) - because our bodies are moderate (37 Celsius). Mesophiles thrive in moderate temperatures. The human intestine contains many beneficial mesophilic bacteria, such as dietary Lactobacillus acidophilus as well. Extremophiles thrive in conditions considered too extreme for most life forms - temperatures from 85 to 113 degrees Celsius, salt lakes, acidic or alkaline environments.   

They multiply by dividing themselves, or by passing genes from one cell to another when they come in contact through a tube called pilus. Some bacteria move by gliding on surfaces. Others control their movement through internal gas bubbles. Some bacteria have tails and they rotate them like propellers going as fast as 0.00017 km per hour - the equivalent of a man running at 100 meters per second. E.coli can travel 25 times their own length in 1 second, equivalent to a horse running 215 km per hour.

When bacteria do not have enough resources to live they turn inactive. Spores can remain dormant for centuries. They are resistant to radiation, desiccation, starvation, chemicals and extremes of temperature. In 2007, biologists revived a 8-million-year-old bacterium from the Antarctic ice.

Most people react negatively to bacteria. But they create the air we breathe; the nitrogen in the soil that plants need. Friendly bacteria help the human body survive. Bacteria in the digestive system are crucial for the breakdown of nutrients, such as complex sugars, into forms the body can use. Friendly bacteria protect us from dangerous ones by occupying places in the body that disease causing bacteria want to occupy. Some friendly bacteria rescue us by attacking bad bacteria. Lactic acid bacteria have been used for the preparation of foods as cheese, soy sauce, vinegar, yoghurt and pickles and fermented foods for thousands of years. Bacteria can break down organic compounds at remarkable speed and help in waste processing. They are frequently used for cleaning up oil spills and clearing up toxic waste. Pharmaceutical and chemical industries use bacteria in the production of chemicals. Bacteria, such as Bacillus thuringiensis, can be used in agriculture instead of pesticides without the undesirable consequences of pesticides.

On the other hand some of the most deadly epidemics in human history have been caused by bacteria – Cholera, Diphtheria,  Dysentery, Plague, Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, Typhoid, Typhus.

Here are some more odd facts:

1,458 new species of bacteria live in the bellybutton of human beings. Everyone’s bellybutton ecology is unique and one volunteer’s belly button harboured bacteria that had previously been found only in soil from Japan, where he had never been.

Bacteria only multiply – unlike humans - to the extent that there is food. The amount of bacteria on a pair of jeans reaches a maximum after 2 weeks of wear. You can wear them for the rest of your life without worrying about them getting any dirtier!

Human faeces is mostly bacteria that are both dead and alive.

Magnetospirillium magneticum has the ability to take in iron, convert it to magnetic magnetite, align it along its body, and travel using magnetic fields.

Millions of people don’t actually need to use deodorant (especially East Asians) because they have a gene that stops them from producing sweat that attracts body-odour-causing bacteria.

One teaspoon of the bacterium C. botulinum, properly distributed, could kill every human being in Asia.

The “smell” of rain on the earth is produced by bacteria.

Floating bacteria are effective at spurring condensation, leading to snow and rain. Some scientists propose spraying bacteria into the clouds to end droughts.

Deinococcus radiodurans can survive 10,000 times the dose of radiation lethal to humans, making it a prime candidate for the clean-up of nuclear waste.

Ralstonia metallidurans can turn dissolved gold into solid nuggets.

Some marine animals have specialized light organs which contain bioluminescent bacteria which turn on and off like a flashlight. The flashlight fish uses its light to communicate with other fish, attract prey and avoid predators. The bacteria benefit by receiving nutrients and oxygen from the fish's blood.

Bacteria signal to each other through chemicals produced. Through these signals, bacterial species know how many others of their kind exist and whether there is a “ quorum”. The bacteria change and coordinate their behaviour when a "quorum" is present.

Are humans beings the dominant life forms of the Earth, or are bacteria? The terrifying "thought control" talent of the Toxoplasma gondii protozoa is amazing. It infects rats and then alters their brains so that the rodents seek out their natural predator, cats. This is because T. gondii can only complete its reproductive cycle in feline intestines. The rats offer themselves to be eaten and the T. gondii parasites complete their lives. It also infects humans and I wonder how much of our activities come from its orders. After all, your body has 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. 

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Denis Giles

25 July 2016

Created: 25 July 2016

Last Updated: 25 July 2016

Hits: 3589

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

When you spend a weekend watching Hollywood horror movies based on mosquitoes – ‘Mosquito Man’, ‘Skeeter’, ‘How a Mosquito Operates’, ‘Sucker’ (the story of a suicidal man transformed into a vengeful mosquito) and ‘Mosquito’, then you realize how important the mosquito is to the economy. Imagine the number of people employed by these movies - actors, directors, script writers, animators, stuntmen, makeup artists, spot boys, distributors, popcorn sellers and ushers.

The mosquito is the largest employer in the world. It makes millionaires out of ordinary people. Even I have benefitted by getting space in a newspaper for this article. And so do at least ten thousand people who blog about the mosquito regularly. So do junior newspaper reporters who, running out of ideas, write about the “new breakthrough” in the battle against malaria. and the columnists who give advice on how to keep the bites away (wear yellow, don’t wear yellow), the newsprint makers who sell so much more paper to accommodate the news and printers who print out miles of statistics on the mosquito every year.

Look at the gadgets. The Good Knight owner who had so much money that he put it into Malayali films in which elephants sat on chairs and smoked cigarettes (I met him when the film got banned!) There are strange blue light gadgets that lie in offices and consume electricity while waiting for mosquitoes to fly into them. There are things that plug in to the wall near your bed, coils and sticks, and Fogging machines that patrol through your streets poisoning man and mosquito alike. Weed killers, lawn mowers, concrete layers, pond and marsh drainers. Manufacturers, labour, staff, distributers, shareholders – everyone makes money.

Then come the insect repellent creams like Odomos and at least a hundred different “ayurvedic” anti mosquito pastes, creams and sprays. “Natural alternative” skin patches made with vitamin B. If each company employs 100 people plus the distributors, how many would that be?

The ‘machhardanis’ that we all grew up with, the tents saturated with anti mosquito chemicals that are sold on the roadsides. The cloth makers should give the creature a big thank you for the long sleeves that everyone in a mosquito area wears - More cloth, more money. Perfumers have found that perfume repels more mosquitoes than Deet, so that is the new selling gimmick.

Now the heavy hitters: the chemical companies that have destroyed so much of the world while trying to kill the mosquito; all the companies that manufacture DDT which, despite being banned, is used everywhere. Larvicides are chemicals, like Methoprene, Pyriproxyfen, applied to water to control mosquito larvae. Adulticides like malathion, Permethrin, Resmethrin, Sumithrin, Scourge and Anvil are used in spraying to control adult mosquitoes. Synergists like Piperonyl Butoxide and MGK-264 which are not toxic to the mosquitoes themselves, but make Adulticides more effective. All these chemicals are dangerous – pyrethroids are neurotoxins and have been linked with liver and thyroid failure. All the chemicals listed above cause human cancer. So, thousands of doctors are given jobs and hospitals flourish – all because of the mosquito. Pyrethroids are highly toxic to fish, crustaceans, and bees; So more doctors get jobs when you eat poisoned fish and crabs. And once the bees all disappear, I am sure thousands of people will have to be employed to manually pollinate the fruit trees so that we can continue to eat. Please include the foggers, sprayers who are employed by the mosquito. And the people who make the thousands of cans that carry the chemicals. Because fogging is so dangerous, the market has created respirator masks with replaceable cartridges. So lots of more people have been given jobs to protect you from things that are invented to kill mosquitoes. Imagine the legions of advertising agencies and sales representatives.

Government municipal agencies should also thank the mosquito, because they can pretend to buy chemicals to fog the towns and divert the money. Many daughters have been married off and many sons of middle level bureaucrats have gone abroad to study on mosquito money.

Have I included all the thousands of people and scientists who have written reports on how these chemicals are extremely toxic? After all they get grants to do study after study proving the same thing – That none of these pesticides have any effect on mosquitoes and at the same time are harmful to human health. None of what they say has any effect on the pesticide industry or government regulations. But they all, bless the mosquito, get lifelong research jobs. Millions of scientists research the mosquito all day, every day: whether they can sterilize it, whether it can spread Aids, whether crossing one species with another will make them ineffective, modifying mosquito genetics to make them flightless, creating transgenic bacteria which eat mosquito guts etc. Inventors of non oily films across water. Researchers who have found a chemical that disables the part of the insect's brain that smells humans. Others who find a way to switch off the mosquitoes’ heat detection ability. Vaccine makers who experiment on thousands of children in Africa without any luck. Scientists who work on introducing scorpion venom into mosquito genes. Pills which, when swallowed, kill any biting mosquito. Ovi traps to attract egg laying females. Recently a British company, called Oxitec, opened a genetically modified mosquito farm in Brazil to produce millions of GM insects which will (hopefully) battle the other mosquitoes.

How many mad scientists, during the Second World War, escaped war duty in Germany and Japan by working in laboratories to create malarial mosquitoes and their carriers. The Germans tried to halt the march of the Allies into Italy by introducing millions of larvae of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. British and American soldiers survived due to quinine. The Italian population didn’t - malaria cases rose from 1,217 in 1943 to 54,929 in 1944.

Let us not forget the people employed directly by mosquitoes. Mosquito inspectors who come regularly to inspect my pond. All the thousands of people who work in Public Health Institutions and sanitation companies around the world. All the mosquito “biologists”.

This is a partial list of the current vacancies advertised by mosquito control agencies in the US:

Labourers to operate tractors, lawnmowers, weed-eaters and other equipment in mosquito spraying programmes, Mosquito Control Division Manager to oversee budget, planning, operations, research, and personnel, Manager Mosquito Abatement, Program Extension Agent Mosquito Management Services, Vector Ecologist, Operations Supervisor Mosquito Services, Land Stewardship Seasonal Fellow in Controlling Invasive Species, Research Assistant lymphatic filariasis, Manager Public Health Community Programme, Research Entomologist, Research Geneticist, Information Technology Intern, Biologist / Entomologist / Toxicologist, Industrial Hygienist / Chemist, Program Assistant Zika, Seasonal Assistant Vector Control, Senior Environmental Health Inspector, Zika Technical Advisor, Environmental Health Specialist (Full-time and Part-time), Executive Assistant to Public Health Officer, Senior Environmental Health Inspector, Pest Control Specialist, Vector Control Inspector, Education Coordinator Vector Control, Integrated Vector Management Compliance Officer, Urban Water Compliance Planner, Entomologist, Communications and Knowledge Officer Tropical Health, Seasonal Vector Technician, Street Maintenance Crew Leader, Administrative Assistant Mosquito & Vector Control, Public Health Sanitarian, Environmental Health Director, Mobile Application Developer.

We employ doctors, nurses, ward boys, hospital management, and ambulances for those afflicted with malaria, encephalitis, zika, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya. The glucose manufacturers, the syringe guys, the medicines, the quinine manufacturers. The pharma companies earn no less than a billion dollars every year from the mosquito bitten. And they employ millions of people.

Have we left out the aquaculture industry? The fish bred for human eating are fed millions of mosquito larvae which are specially grown for the industry. I had to buy Gambusia fish for my pond so that larvae are eaten – imagine how many fish are bred for this purpose and released into still waters.

In all this we forget the main economic importance of mosquitoes. They are eaten by other insects which, in turn, are eaten by birds and animals who are either eaten by us or used by us for our own well being. For instance mosquitoes in the Arctic regions decide how the caribou move to avoid the mosquito swarms. The local hunters follow these paths and get their food. Mosquitoes eat aphids which otherwise would destroy all our plants. They serve as pollinators as well. Mosquitoes influence the development of agricultural areas by preventing or limiting the use of infested territory. Dredgers, swamp fillers, tree cutters – all owe their living to mosquitoes.

They decide whether a party is held outside or inside, whether windows are open or not. The air conditioning industry owes a lot to these pests.

Their final employment is, of course, the people who bury and cremate humans. Mosquitoes have killed more than half the people who ever lived. More people have died in wars from malaria than from bullets and bombs. Even now mosquitoes cause anywhere from 1 million to 2.7 million deaths each year. Imagine the employment of thousands of grave diggers and priests, crematoria staff, professional mourners, hearses, white sheet sellers and florists.

The only thing that hasn’t happened is mosquitoes as human food. But even that will happen. Entomophagy (eating insects by people) has been recommended by the UN as the only way to save the planet.

Could the mosquito be God? If it disappears, so do the jobs of at least 150 million people. The economy of entire countries will be ruined, Wall Street stocks will come crashing down, pharma companies will go bankrupt. The population will double within a year and food will run out. People will come onto the streets and riots will ensue. 

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Denis Giles

01 August 2016

Created: 01 August 2016

Last Updated: 01 August 2016

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Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

There is a type of “tourist” who comes to India to steal our treasures. Not the same one who takes away old statues from temples, coins and antiques. This one takes our insects. We have not bothered to acknowledge this theft or plug it. Twenty five seizures have been made since 1995. This is probably less than 1% of the insects going out every day. Insect species are of great ecological value in the Indian ecosystem. Unfortunately, no one in the government or academe is studying the population trends of insects.

Everyone is concentrating on pests and pest management.

Insect stealing is not done by a few people. It is large gangs from a few countries that descend on us, go into the mountains or tribal areas and pay local people a pittance to collect live insects, which are then skewered or drugged and taken out in suitcases, checked into the airlines as private luggage or sent to themselves through parcels and international couriers.

One insect in severe danger is the stag beetle. India is home to the Giraffe Stag-Beetle (Prosopocoilus giraffa) the world's largest saw-tooth stag beetle with long and sharp jaws.

Stag Beetles are good for the environment. They eat rotting wood, returning important minerals to the soil, but don't eat living plants. Male Stag Beetles have large jaws that look like the antlers of a deer, hence the name. These are used in courtship displays and to wrestle other male beetles. They spend most of their life underground as larvae, only emerging for a few weeks to find a mate and reproduce. Stag beetles and their larvae are quite harmless. They are among the rarer beetles – and now even rarer because of the Japanese.

Till now the Japanese have been known for their single minded destruction of whales. Now they have emerged as the single source for the world’s destruction of beetles, especially stag beetles.

The “beetle mania” in Japan has led to a multi-million dollar industry that revolves around the import of exotic beetle species. This mania originated with a hit arcade game by Sega called Mushi (insect) King, in which players collect cards of virtual stag beetles as fighters in tournaments. From card and virtual beetles, the passion led to collecting real insects as pets or for staging fights for gamblers or dead ones as collections. The Japanese started interbreeding their own beetles and producing different shapes. However it didn’t take long for the Japanese public to be bored with their own native species and by the 1990s people were illegally importing over 700 species. Trade in stag beetles has reached $100 million annually.  And an entirely new mafia of insect traders was born that reached its hands all over Australasia to bring in millions of insects. Japan has 1200 species of beetles in its shops – only 35 are Japanese.

Japan has made beetle smuggling easy. Pandering to the craze for these insects, the Japanese government revised the law in 1999 and legalized the import of foreign beetle species. 34 foreign species were legalized in 1999 – and 505 species in 2003. Today, buying foreign stag and rhinoceros beetles is as easy as buying groceries, because beetle shops are common – even being sold through vending machines. Stag beetles can be purchased at pet stores, department stores and shops that specialize in beetles. Credit card holders can order them through the Internet. Most pet shop beetles sell for five dollars. High-priced ones go of as much as $2,500. The bigger, the more valuable.

The countries that are losing their beetles to Japan are Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, China, South America, France, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Australia. There are group tours organised to the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia whose sole purpose is to collect stag beetles. The Japanese tourists that we make fun of because of their obsession with photography, may not be as harmless as we think. This could be simply a cover for picking up creatures that we are not selling.

Big beetles cost more, the most attractive being the larger Lucanidae species. The prices of these dead insects rival those of major artwork or antiques, so very strenuous efforts are made to collect them, regardless of the ecological cost. In 2001 Japan imported 680,000 stag and rhinoceros beetles. This has now gone to over a million annually and the market sells more than $100 million worth. Export of beetles is formally banned in most countries. Dorcas antaeus beetles are absolutely prohibited in Bhutan , India and Nepal, but since Japan allows their import, smuggled specimens from these countries command much higher prices.

In 2001, two Japanese were arrested at Nepal’s Tribhuvan International Airport for attempting to smuggle 542 stag beetles out of the country. In 2000, forest rangers in southern Nepal caught a Japanese Web designer and his two Nepalese guides bagging stag beetles. This did not deter another set of 'wildlife entrepreneurs' from collecting over 200 specimens of 6 species in 2002, which were also confiscated. Violations involving stag beetles have also been reported in Taiwan. Bhutan has also apprehended Japanese tourists who had collected a large number of stag beetles from Mongar dzongkhag. The insects were later released back in the forest. In September 2000 a complaint was filed, against a local tourism company who brought in insect collecting tourists, by the Ministry of Agriculture. Australian customs arrested two Japanese trying to smuggle 1,300 native beetles out of Australia’s Lord Howe Island. More and more large beetles from the jungles of Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Nepal and India are being taken. More than 500 different species of stag beetles, a third of the world's known species, have been imported to Japan from Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia. A group trying to leave Turkey by car was apprehended with thousands of bugs hidden in boxes and tubes. Biology professors who examined the cache identified 6,014 bugs from 48 different species, including ladybugs, cockroaches, and various types of stag beetles, grasshoppers, flies, and bees from the Black Sea region and the northern part of Central Anatolia. The haul was worth $300,000.

The Eastern Himalayas and Western Ghats of India are prime hunting grounds for smugglers of rare Rhinoceros, Longhorned and Jewel beetles. The trade has increased in recent years and Japanese have been caught in West Bengal with beetles.  Hundreds more have escaped the lax and inefficient – and illiterate- net of the wildlife department. Thanks to the inadequate law enforcement, our insects, particularly beetles and butterflies, are being sold all over the internet. Two Czechs were caught recently bringing out rare beetles and butterflies from Singalila National Park. These were to go to Japanese collectors through their website. Many foreigners pose as scientists to get admission into the parks.

According to ecologists, lack of awareness is at the heart of the problem why insect smuggling is allowed to continue unchecked. Insects are crucial to forests' survival: The population of frugivorous and insect-eating birds and bats dwindle when large insects begin to disappear, as do those of forest creatures like small carnivores and rodents, who depend on insect larvae for food. Beetle collectors do a great deal of damage to the environment – tree barks are stripped, old logs are rolled over, moss is uprooted – many other insects and birds lose their lives. Forests dwindle. Local populations of insects disappear and all the life dependent on them.

India is seen as an easy target. While rangers are ignorant and easily bribed, police do not see insect smuggling as an important crime. Smugglers know that customs and airline authorities, who scan baggage at ports of exit, ignore bags stuffed with insects and butterflies.

Japanese beetles face extinction as they have been hunted down all over the islands and are cross bred with non-native stag beetle species from Southeast Asia. So the craze for non native species will only increase.

Is it not time for India to start training its enforcement authorities on insect smuggling?

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Denis Giles

18 July 2016

Created: 18 July 2016

Last Updated: 18 July 2016

Hits: 1675

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

I am really sad that Dr. Sanjeev Balyan has been moved out of the Animal Husbandry department which he headed as MOS Agriculture for the last two years. He is a vet himself and an excellent administrator. For the first time in my life I will tell you about a Minister’s achievements.

The first thing he did was to change the Veterinary Council and put two outstanding people as the heads – Dr. Sharma and Dr. Gurdial Singh. The secretary, who was the worst officer in the history of India and had destroyed the entire institution, was made accountable for all the cheating he had done for years, and left in a panic.

What was the situation that Dr. Balyan and this Government inherited: a totally useless Veterinary Council that had no control over the quality of veterinary colleges or the behaviour and knowledge of vets – in fact it was totally unaware of how many vets there are in the country and what they did. The syllabus was outdated and there were no courses for wildlife, ophthalmology, or any specific organ.  No vets were taught how to castrate (crushing the testicles between two stones is the normal practice), dehorn or follow any hygienic methods of insemination – leading to sweeping diseases of foot and mouth and bovine leukaemia.  No vet ever studied to increase his knowledge after he got his initial degree.

In the last two years Dr. Balyan worked at changing the veterinary syllabus, making standards for veterinary practices, making it compulsory for all vets to attend a refresher course every year or have their licences cancelled, and making an all India register of vets and where they were practicing so that anyone who needed a vet could find out immediately.

Veterinary education and veterinary practices in India have undergone sweeping changes. The new veterinary syllabus of 2016 will stop the cruel use of live healthy animals for veterinary teaching and training. It will, instead, ensure the use of ethically sourced cadavers for anatomical studies and simulation methods for students to acquire better clinical skills, before handling and treating animals under supervised clinical training. Veterinary students and teachers had often protested about using live animals to teach veterinary science, since all over the world this has been replaced with technology. Numerous studies have proved that the learning generated by non-animal teaching methods are better than those achieved by animal use. Non-animal teaching methods do not cause students psychological trauma, or force them to be a part of something that they consider to be cruel and abusive. The new curriculum also makes students undergo internship programmes at animal welfare organisations so that they learn animal welfare.

The new Veterinary Practice Regulations, once implemented, will ensure that minimum standards of veterinary services are made available to animals through static and mobile veterinary clinics. These facilities will be well equipped with man power, essential veterinary medicines, instruments, diagnostic facilities, and waste disposal system and will function on Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and humane veterinary practice protocols.   The protocol on humane veterinary practices mandates that animals must be given anaesthesia before invasive and painful animal husbandry procedures, such as castration, and that when euthanasia is required, such as to alleviate suffering from terminal illness, it must be done in a painless manner by a veterinarian. New modern courses have been introduced, especially in the area of wildlife and birds. We finally have a syllabus that is on par with foreign colleges. Now all we need is a type of student who likes animals, rather than aiming to simply get a ‘Doctor’ in front of his name so that his dowry rates go up.

Continuing Veterinary Education is not a new concept. Doctors need to learn the latest knowledge whether they are in government or private practice. Each vet will participate in one training course per year. To bring a mechanism for compulsory CVE programme for veterinary practitioners in India, VCI will set up a credit based system of certification for compulsory knowledge upgradation of practitioners.

For the first time, online registration will be made compulsory with VCI, for veterinarians, to practice anywhere in the country. The animal husbandry sector needs about 2 lakh veterinarians – as of now there are only 63,000.  The VCI has increased the number of seats in colleges from 60 to 100 seats and made it easier to start new colleges.

Dr. Balyan also banned the commercial import of dogs for breeding. Thousands of diseased and unsuitable dogs were pouring into the country, being bought illegally by breeders. The notification from Director General of Foreign Trade came in consultation with the Agriculture Ministry. India has an unregulated pet trade, growing at a rate of about 20% per year, and these imported breeds are responsible for 90% of the dog bites and zoonotic diseases. Animal shelters like mine are crowded with pedigrees that have been thrown away by owners a few months after they buy them.

Dr. Balyan has gone to the department of water preservation. There are hundreds of issues still pending – from amending the sizes of battery cages for chickens to making minimum standards for all the hideous rotting government veterinary hospitals in the country. From banning exotic skins and meat to reforming slaughterhouses. The most important step in conserving animals and people is to ban oxytocin and remove antibiotics from farm animal feed, and this should be the topmost priority of his successor. Let me keep my fingers crossed that we get someone who understands the importance of animal welfare. 

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