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By:

Minal Sancheti

2 May 2026 at 12:26:53 pm

Funeral for animals

Mumbai: On the occasion of National Animal Rights Day, a funeral was held for all the voiceless creatures that humans have killed for selfish reasons. The act was a campaign and was a brainchild of Animal Climate and Health in collaboration with Our Planet Theirs Too. The purpose was to spread awareness about animal cruelty. The campaign took place at Carter Road Amphitheatre and so a crowd of both young and old supported the cause. Speaking about animal cruelty, recently the internet was...

Funeral for animals

Mumbai: On the occasion of National Animal Rights Day, a funeral was held for all the voiceless creatures that humans have killed for selfish reasons. The act was a campaign and was a brainchild of Animal Climate and Health in collaboration with Our Planet Theirs Too. The purpose was to spread awareness about animal cruelty. The campaign took place at Carter Road Amphitheatre and so a crowd of both young and old supported the cause. Speaking about animal cruelty, recently the internet was flooded with a viral video of a group of men at Mira Road taking a piglet to a locality where goats were brought for religious sacrifice. Aparjita Ashish, the founder and director of Animal Climate and Health said, “It is an act of cruelty to kill animals for religious sacrifice but to protest against this they were harassing a baby pig. The poor pig was screaming for his life. So how’s that right? If you want to protest, protest peacefully.” Ashish also comments on the Apex Judiciary’s decision of euthanising terminally ill dogs, “If the dog has a serious illness like rabies and is in a lot of pain, with a doctor’s permission and in a peaceful manner, they should be euthanised. The apex court also spoke about the ABC or animal birth control which if done with correct procedures, can help bring down issues related to the stray dogs. Many times the process is wrong so the animals become subject to cruelty.” She even added that the strays should not be displaced as that will leave them confused. This is also an act of ill treatment. The occasion saw a large number of gatherers. According to the campaigners, being vegan is not just for protecting animals but also for the climate. Ashish explained, “If you see the name of our NGO, it is Animal Climate and Health. So we also talk about the impact of consuming animal products on the environment.” She gives an example of how methane gas is produced because of the dairy animals and how the food and resources to breed animals are so much that it affects the environment. The supporters who participated in the campaign said they also noticed many health benefits of going vegan. Anil Nagpal, a senior citizen and volunteer with the organisation said, “For many years I was going through ill health. I tried every treatment but nothing really helped much. But then someone convinced me to go vegan and since that time my health has improved drastically. After this many people in my circles who used to eat animal products have given up.” When asked what his protein sources are, he said, “I eat lentils and legumes. Vegetables also contain protein.” Ashish claimed that humans have an ego that makes them think they are above animals.

The Man Who Spoke for the Earth

In the mid-1960s, long before climate change was a topic that could fill out a political manifesto or launch a thousand think pieces, James Lovelock was inventing devices that could detect environmental devastation before anyone else even knew it was happening. There was something of a mad scientist about Lovelock. Not the cartoonish, wild-haired archetype but the kind that unsettles the establishment - too imaginative for the dogmatic, too intuitive for the empirical purists. He was a brilliant experimental chemist, a self-taught polymath and an independent thinker in an age of institutional consensus. And, much to the chagrin of his many detractors, he was right.


Lovelock’s first great breakthrough was the electron capture detector, a sensor so sensitive that it could detect minute traces of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. He had discovered the threat of CFCs long before the world panicked about the ozone layer. But Lovelock’s true legacy would be something even more controversial, an idea that would put him at odds with many in the scientific establishment.


While studying the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, Lovelock noticed something curious. Their gaseous compositions were inert, chemically lifeless. Earth’s, by contrast, was a strange and dynamic anomaly. Despite the planet’s geophysical changes, its atmospheric composition remained remarkably stable. Why? Lovelock reasoned that the only plausible explanation was life itself. The billions of organisms on Earth were not just passively inhabiting their environment; they were actively shaping it, ensuring that the planet remained habitable. Life was not merely reacting to the planet’s chemistry but was maintaining it. This was the birth of what he would call the Gaia hypothesis, a term suggested by the novelist William Golding, who was Lovelock’s neighbour.


Gaia was a seductive, almost mystical notion, and it made Lovelock famous, but not always in the way he intended. To his critics, he had veered into the realm of pseudoscience, abandoning the sober calculations of chemistry for something perilously close to New Age spiritualism.


Biologists like Richard Dawkins dismissed Gaia as a vague, quasi-religious notion, lacking the hard-nosed mechanics of Darwinian evolution. Lovelock, in their view, had veered into New Age folly, a man seduced by his own poetic imagination.


But Lovelock was no mystic. He was a scientist, and scientists construct models. To illustrate how life could regulate a planetary environment, he built Daisyworld, a computer simulation in which black and white daisies adjusted their populations to maintain a stable temperature. The mechanism was elegant, self-correcting, and required no divine intervention.


For decades, Gaia remained on the fringes of scientific respectability - too grand for biology, too unorthodox for physics. And yet, as the climate crisis unfolded, Lovelock’s vision of Earth as a delicate, self-adjusting system took on new urgency. The once-radical notion that humans were destabilizing this balance through carbon emissions and deforestation was now mainstream. By the time the world caught up, Lovelock had long since moved on to his next heresy: warning that climate tipping points could render vast swathes of the planet uninhabitable in a matter of decades.


Lovelock’s last years were tinged with irony. Once derided as an alarmist, he became sceptical of the environmental movement’s moral hand-wringing, arguing for a cool-eyed stewardship that placed Gaia at the centre of concern. He dismissed carbon trading schemes as bureaucratic fantasies and advocated nuclear fusion as a viable path to survival.


By the time he died in 2022 at 103, the debate had shifted. Gaia was no longer heresy; it was foundation. The biosphere-as-system, life as a planetary force were now common knowledge. As for Lovelock’s critics, their resistance had been reduced to footnotes. It was fitting. He had seen the future, long before the world was ready to believe it. As usual, he had been right.


(The author is a U.S.-based data scientist)

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