Badminton, Animal welfare and other hypocrisies

Dear Jwala & Ashwini,

I have no intention to take the shine away from the beautiful medals and trophies you earned. I congratulate even to those which you did not win but tried your best. You certainly deserve all the accolades and applauses showed on you. You have inspired thousands of girls pan-India to take up this game and excel in it. Kudos. Well done.

While that, I see you both are brand ambassadors of Peta. That is cool, another feather on your cap. [See what I did there? Feathers? and you play Badminton. No? Okay]. Anyways, I wrote this post with a single intention of calling out your hypocrisy, which you obviously did not sense while joining the Peta.

Before I forget, let me bring this image up. I can see you Jwala ‘bleeding’ as part of your Campaign against Cockfighting! Just Wow! Thanks to you, those villagers (all seven of them) can now have a melodramatic moral epiphany and stop betting on those poor birds. They will eat Daal-fry tonight, instead of those chicken kababs.

Also, personally, Badminton is probably the only sport I managed to play reasonably well. Now that I learned more about it, I must give it up. In m defense, I had no clue how the Shuttlecock is manufactured all this while. However, you should have known this. You had chosen Badminton as your bread and butter. It is expected of you to be a little more curious about your props than me.

For documentation purpose, let them list all the issues for you.

1. The Shuttlecock is made from plucked feathers of live ducks and geese. While this process the birds are not killed, not stunned, they remain alive. The poachers and farmers hold the bird down by the neck and pluck a fistful of feathers by force.
2. They are live birds, and obviously, they will bleed, but not to death. They survive bleeding through the day, only to make next Shuttlecock by growing replacement feathers.
3. There is science behind the selection of feathers. Only the ones with the right weight and correct angles make the cut (pun?). This also means the most feathers plucked are going to be discarded.

16 feathers in FEATHER Shuttlecock used in Badminton. (Feathers are plucked from ducks , geese and sometimes hens pic.twitter.com/OEPgIJHlPV

— Amol Singh (@0731Amol) April 28, 2015

There are few other non-animal-torture related aspects which also begs for your attention.

1. India cannot supply the feathers to all the 50k+ shuttlecocks it produces annually. So obviously it comes from Bangladesh as smuggled. They escape tax obligation from either of countries.
2. Also, these plucking factories are known to misuse children. There are reports on how they are being used to pluck or cut the feathers for 10-12 hours earning not more than 50 Rs.
3. Reports say one-fifth of children in Rajapur, Uluberia, Howrah in West Bengal are employed to manufacture these. They are under the age of 10, do not go to school, undergo frequent industrial accidents. Read through the report.

Did you get it now ? The hypocrisy in it ? When can I see your Campaign against these, please ? When can we expect you shout for ethical treatment animals of your own game?

Thanks, Not a fan. – The Bach