55/ 100 Milk Bowl Dogs
The Milk / Food Exchange
In the photograph above there are three dogs sleeping haphazardly on a collection of blankets and sacks that kind local people will have laid on the stone floor to make a bed for them. There is the iconic blue wall of Jodhpur, where this photograph was made, and there is a red clay bowl. Each day someone would come and fill this bowl, not with food or water, but milk.
Personally I wouldn’t give my adult dogs milk to drink. I know from bitter experience that it usually leads to an upset stomach and having to risk waking the neighbours with the Dyson carpet cleaner at 3 o’clock in the morning. Not ideal. Clearly the dogs in India seem to tolerate it and I wonder if it is because they have drunk it all their lives and are able to digest it perhaps? Maybe someone who knows the answer can tell me.
Where the milk for the dogs, and people, comes from is quite fascinating I think. Here in the UK almost everyone will get their milk from a supermarket or shop. You go along, buy a prepackaged variety of your choice and take it home to drink. In India many folk don’t seem to do that and instead get it delivered from the dairy by bicycle.
One day we saw such a bicycle, laden with steel milk urns. The milkman was merrily riding down the road ringing a little bell until he was hailed by an old lady waving her arm out of the door of her little house in Jodhpur. The bicycle duly stopped and the rider filled her large metal bowl with milk and took a payment. The lady then passed the milkman a large plastic bag of food scraps.
I asked our guide at the time what the scraps were for. Apparently the milkman owns the cattle and he collects as much waste food as possible (of course, the donators get some good karma in return) whereupon he takes it back to his cows and uses it to feed them. Apparently he has to buy very little food.
Not only does he sell the milk, but he gets the cows fed for free too. Seems like a great business to me.
[In Delhi we once spent a long time trying to buy some milk for ourselves. You can read all about that story here.]
