600 cows ‘go missing’ from Greater Noida shelter

GREATER NOIDA: A probe has been initiated by the Gautam Budh Nagar police into the alleged disappearance of over 600 cows from a Greater Noida Authority-aided animal shelter in Jalpura since the imposition of lockdown.
The investigation comes in the wake of allegations by activists from BJP MP Maneka Gandhi’s People For Animals (PFA) that these 600 cows were trafficked for money or poisoned by the shelter’s management.However, police have not yet filed any FIR in the matter.
Pragati Khanna, one of the activists, claimed she had been receiving complaints from animal lovers about two to three mini-trucks loaded with cattle leaving the shelter almost every week since March-end.
“I had gone to the shelter and filmed mini-trucks waiting inside for ferring cows. When asked, the caretaker told me the vehicles were meant for ferrying the cattle from the over-populated Jalpura shelter to cowsheds in other places, but he could not produce any paperwork for the same,” she said.
Animal activists said the shelter management has been selling stray cows picked up from roads to smugglers and illegal breeders in exchange for money. “We intercept a lot of vehicles on suspicion of smuggling of cows with the help of police, these rescued animals are sent to the shelter, but then they disappear,” Khanna said.
In fact, the allegations surfaced after a team from the animal husbandry department of the district recently visited the cow shelter to treat some 25-30 cows who suddenly fell sick.
Virendra Kumar Shrivastava, the district’s chief veterinary officer, said the team treated the animals but five of them died. “As per protocol, we conducted an autopsy and found that they died of poisoning, which is a normal thing because during the rainy season, the green fodder gets poisonous,” he said.
When contacted, Dr Prem Chand from the public health department of GNIDA, said the caretaker is solely responsible for the maintenance of the shelter, “We gave them land to open the shelter in 2017. The allegations are subject to investigation,” he said.
Police, however, said they have started a probe into the complaint filed by the animal activists. “Prima facie, it seems the caretaker was forced to shift some cows to another shelter in Garhmukteshwar as the Greater Noida Authority stopped paying for fodder since lockdown. Anyway, a probe is on,” a police official said.
Despite repeated attempts, Bharat Bhushan, the owner of the Goras Foundation that runs the cow shelter, could not be contacted.