Photo: Manas Kumar
At some point in our lives, probably while we were eating a hamburger, somebody thought mentioning the sacred status the cows have in India would make for a nice conversation subject. That's the kind of information that once it enters your brain, there's no way it's ever going to get out. After all, we all have friends who eat hamburgers, so there will be plenty of opportunities to use it.
But what these people fail to tell you is that besides sacred, the Indian cows are something else as well: a nuisance. Being allowed to wander freely and, despite their holiness, being completely oblivious to what a road looks like and what it's for, cows often end up causing massive crashes that sometimes end up with both human and sacred casualties.
Faced with a somewhat weird problem, Traffic police in one district of Madhya Pradesh state had to get creative, so it thought that it couldn't hurt to make the cows more visible. And since the bulk of the incidents happened at night, they figured putting some glow-in-the-dark stickers on the beasts' horns might stand a chance of lowering their numbers.
300 animals were selected for this pilot project, reports The Mirror, and the simple solution turned out to be surprisingly effective. Now, India is in the process of applying radium paint to spread over the horns of cows and bulls all across the country. Since the traffic police has other things on its hands besides painting animal parts, the farmers have been asked to lend a hand as well.
In a country with a population of over one billion people, you would think that the 550 casualties from traffic incidents involving stray animals registered in 2015 would go unnoticed, but the cows with glowing horns would prove you wrong. Considering thousands of Indians die every year in train accidents and nobody cares to do anything about it, we get a strong feeling this measure might have been taken primarily for the cows' well-being.
Faced with a somewhat weird problem, Traffic police in one district of Madhya Pradesh state had to get creative, so it thought that it couldn't hurt to make the cows more visible. And since the bulk of the incidents happened at night, they figured putting some glow-in-the-dark stickers on the beasts' horns might stand a chance of lowering their numbers.
300 animals were selected for this pilot project, reports The Mirror, and the simple solution turned out to be surprisingly effective. Now, India is in the process of applying radium paint to spread over the horns of cows and bulls all across the country. Since the traffic police has other things on its hands besides painting animal parts, the farmers have been asked to lend a hand as well.
In a country with a population of over one billion people, you would think that the 550 casualties from traffic incidents involving stray animals registered in 2015 would go unnoticed, but the cows with glowing horns would prove you wrong. Considering thousands of Indians die every year in train accidents and nobody cares to do anything about it, we get a strong feeling this measure might have been taken primarily for the cows' well-being.
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