Only radical kindness can drive true reform

This was nearly a decade ago, when we set up Obhoyaronno, the country's first animal welfare organisation with a mission to end dog culling in Bangladesh. We were young and innocent, with unrealistic hope in our hearts and a very clear line of demarcation between good and evil. It was us vs them. "Us" were the animal lovers, who bore kindness in our hearts and would set the world straight. And "them" were the animal abusers, who needed to be weeded out.

One day, I came to know about a severely wounded puppy in a local slum and went running to rescue him. A young "man" had allegedly put out cigarettes on the puppy and left him with multiple burn wounds, which got infected. The puppy was barely alive. I was boiling inside and wanted to do the same to the perpetrator.

When I saw the perpetrator, my heart sank. It was a young boy, no older than my five-year-old nephew. I saw that someone was way ahead of me and had already left similar burn wounds on the little boy's bald head. Some wounds were old and scabbed over, while others were more recent, oozing pus. When I asked who did this to him, he said that it was his stepfather, who had been using the little boy's head as an ashtray for years. The boy couldn't stand up to his stepfather, so he took it out on the puppy. I will never forget the eyes of that little boy. They were dead, reflecting no emotion whatsoever.

The first ever criminal case we ever filed from Obhoyaronno was in 2011, against a group of young men in Rampura who had beaten a dog to death. This was way before the new Animal Welfare Act was passed in 2019; the punishment for the said crime, according to the now-defunct Cruelty to Animals Act, 1920, was a Tk 100 fine and up to three months' imprisonment (under the new law, it's six-month imprisonment and a Tk 50,000 fine).

However, it was unprecedented to arrest anyone for animal cruelty—especially if it's an animal of no economic value, such as a dog—let alone convict him. I had pulled all my strings to have those boys arrested. The news was published in local as well as international media. I felt a huge sense of achievement on the day of our first hearing. This is also when I met those boys for the first time. Three young men, not looking any more lethal than the boys who work at Obhoyaronno. They couldn't understand why they were in handcuffs for something they had been doing all their lives and were applauded for. If sent to jail, these boys would have surely been beaten and brutalised, and come out as hardened criminals. I explored ways for them to mandatorily volunteer at Obhoyaronno, but there was no such system in place. We ended up dropping the case.

We stopped filing criminal charges after that and decided to focus more on policy and legislative reform for the following reasons. First, punishment doesn't work—it never has, it never will. We seek revenge when we seek punishment, and revenge never leads to reform. There is something sinister about rejoicing at someone else's pain and suffering, even if it's your enemy, and a state that doesn't look to rehabilitate people validates as well as encourages this barbaric and regressive behaviour. The understanding of human rights in this country is so poor that it is accepted that prisoners will be treated poorly under police custody. Anything less than brutality is not acceptable, and rehabilitation is too radical a concept.

Secondly, our legal system is broken, corrupt, and can be manipulated by anyone with the right connections. I used my connections to have those boys arrested. I could have bribed the system to keep them in jail without any proper legal proceedings, and no one would question me. I would have also justified it thinking they deserved it.

On top of that, the arrest was possible because those boys were from lower-middle-class families. I knew rich boys who kept animals locked up in the garages of their palatial homes. I never went after them. I could no longer ignore my own glaring hypocrisy. I also became aware of how I was more eager to speak against cruelty to dogs and cats, but not so much for the millions of cows, goats, chickens, and fish we unnecessarily kill every day. Selective compassion ends up teaching us no compassion.

We haven't done our part in creating a more compassionate society. These kids fail us because we failed them. We discontinued our humane education programme at Obhoyaronno because it took too much time and money. I knew better. I saw what education could do, but resources were always limited, and no one wanted to invest in something as intangible as compassion. After all, you cannot quantify the impact of compassion on a spreadsheet, and those who need it the most don't matter.

Finally, punishing powerless people is a cop-out. We convince ourselves that we have done our part, because the real job is much harder and requires sacrifices that you and I aren't willing to make. The real culprits will continue to kill or dislocate or maim animals systemically to avoid responsibilities, or gain popularity, and we will continue to applaud them.

How about dismantling our own faulty moral compass and starting afresh with nothing but compassion in our hearts? How about remembering that most of us, despite our education and upbringing, are capable of causing serious harm to others when we feel scared or threatened? How about empathising not only with the victim, but also with the offender, who is so broken that they can no longer feel empathy? This society is begging for some radical changes. How about we start being radically kind?

Rubaiya Ahmad is the founder and chairman of Obhoyaronno – Bangladesh Animal Welfare Foundation.