Sonal Singh On Sonal's Table
In Mumbai, I would often visit Crawford market in town. The market has an entire area dedicated to sale of pet birds and animals along with stores that cater to every type of bird food and medicines. That’s where I would source most of my stuff from. Except for a few shops, including Rafat Khan and sons (who dealt exclusively in exotic birds and with whom I have spent many happy moments chatting and learning about bird care), the others were pretty poorly maintained. Stacks upon stacks of cages in ill-ventilated areas and with animals/birds stuffed into them like trash in a bin.
However, the day before (it has taken me 24 hours to come out of that trauma and write this) I realized that what I saw at Crawford market is nothing … I repeat, nothing compared to what I saw in the bird market at old Hyderabad, near Charminar. I went to procure grain at a cheaper price and to purchase some other essentials like calcium block etc.
Now, I have seen my fair share of bird markets in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Indore, Allahabad, etc, but Hyderabad by far exceeds the level to which I have seen humans’ stoop. I am talking about the wholesale market here because I have also been seen the exotic pet’s market in Hyderabad and that mostly comprises of home breeders or aviculturists who provide safe, habitable conditions for the birds. These are mostly run by bird aficionados who are knowledge able about the species and needs of the birds. In Hyderabad I have come across everything right from lucy sugar gliders, pied sugar gliders, non-venomous Amazonian snakes, all varieties of exotic birds (conures, cockatoos, macaws, African greys, American parrot-lets, Australian finches/parrots, lorikeets, etc), marmoset monkeys (the smallest species in the world), albino ferrets, Iguanas, geckos, hedgehogs … too many kinds to name here!!
The bird market on Lal Bagh Road in old Hyderabad is about half a kilometre stretch of road. It has pigeonholed sized shops on either side with next to no ventilation and littered with filth. The stink is unimaginable. Some of the shops are not even shops. They are make shift shacks or just stacks of cages on the side of the road placed atop a handcart, sometimes in direct sunlight. The shops sell everything from ducks, varieties of pigeons, various species of finches, African love birds, budgerigars, conures, varieties of hens, cockatiels, rabbits, cats, etc.
Shocking, appalling, disgusting, vomit-inducing – none of these verbal nouns can do justice to what I and my better-half felt when we saw the condition of the livestock. We got a few sick birds from there that we are trying to treat at home now but it doesn’t look so good for them, at the moment. I have separated those birds from my own ones because avian infections travel fast and are deadly, especially for the smaller species of birds.
Some of the things that really raised my hackles were 1 x 1 feet cages with common grey pigeons stuffed into them. There were even smaller cages in which there were two pigeons stuck together. That had been their life for sometime (that’s what it seemed like) because at some point they had laid and egg and hatched a young. The living quarters reminded me of some of the worst kinds of chawls in Mumbai. There were other dealers who had 2 feet cages with nearly 70 odd birds stuffed into them. The space constraint was driving them crazy – they were packing at each other, injuring each other and some were so sick that they sat puffed up at the base of the cage, unable to move to even drink or eat.
The cages for rabbits and cats were the worst. The rabbits were all squished together with little or no green/dry food or even water. They looked weak, lethargic and I am pretty sure they were all diseased. Almost all the shops were selling cats but there was this one shop which had only cats. It was barely a 100 sft shop with cages from floor to ceiling. The cages were barely wide enough to fit one cat in it and they had no food, a bowl of dirty water and no litter box in them. The cats had eye discharge, matted fur, blackened ears (no doubt some form of mite infestation like my Gigi had when we rescued her) and were sleepy and unmoving. It made my blood boil to see their condition. The worst part was that all this is just business for the shop owners and complaining to them only resulted in a shrug and the comment – “Aapko lena hai toh bolo madam. Idhar aise hi chalta hai.”
There were two other things that I witnessed which made me lose all faith in humankind. The first was the cages that were filled with hen chicks. The choozas were not just crammed together but their feathers had been dyed in fluorescent pink, green and other colours to attract customers. Can you imagine something this depraved?
Nearly 50% of the shops in the market also had cages filled with crows … yes, you read that right. I did just write ‘crows’ as in ‘kawwa’. There were some other cages crammed full of a black coloured bird which I could not identify. The highest demand in the Hyderabad bird market is for crows and we saw a few men purchasing them.
Apparently, people of the old city believe in warding off the evil eye by releasing crows and owls. This is something that has been practiced since the time of the Nizams (18th to 20th century). However, what I learned from one shopkeeper was that the crow and the black bird that I saw is scarified as part of the ritual to ward off the evil eye. Now, I don’t know which version is true or accurate but its still barbaric.
How does the government allow this? Aren’t Indian birds a protected species and their incarceration, sale or killing is prohibited under law? How is it that the govt is turning a blind eye in Hyderabad? These shopkeepers are openly flouting all norms and yet they are being allowed to operate. How? Is the value of a non-human life negligible in Hyderabad? The ill-treatment that these poor animals/birds receive is beyond measure. There is no way that their mortality rate can be low! For every one that survives, I am certain that there must be 3 that die. Its time that the government adopted a more proactive and sterner role in cracking down on this trade.
