Animal Rahat’s outreach to government livestock workers saw a big gain last month when 87 livestock development officers attended a workshop taught by Animal Rahat. The focus was on field anesthesia (standing and recumbent stun) to allow bulls to be castrated painlessly. While Animal Rahat succeeded in getting the castration of bulls without anesthetics outlawed in 2012, it’s still the norm in most places. That’s why workshops like this one are so crucial.

Our pilot spay/neuter program is also proceeding apace, as 18 “street dogs” were sterilized last month in two trial villages.

Another awful way in which bullocks are exploited is in the extraction of sugarcane juice to sell to thirsty tourists. A bullock is yoked to a sugarcane-juicing machine and is forced to plod in endless circles all day long, every day, for his whole life.

I hope you’ll be pleased to learn that last month we successfully persuaded a juice vendor in the town of Shirdi—a popular tourist destination—to replace his bullock-powered contraption with a modern, electric juicing machine. Animal Rahat is covering the cost of the machine, thanks to a New York patron, and the vendor will pay for the maintenance himself. Hopefully, after seeing this man’s success, others will want to follow suit and resistance to such modernization will dissolve.

Animal Rahat is also paying for billboards to educate tourists about the cruelty of the bullock-powered machines and to advertise the bullock-free juice stand. We will reach out to taxi drivers, too, and ask them to urge their passengers to patronize the mechanized vendor.