The time has come for Nepal’s Gadhimai festival, a controversial religious celebration involving mass animal sacrifice. Veuer’s Matt Hoffman has the story.
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00:00In Nepal, the time has come for a unique and controversial religious festival.
00:04It's called the Gadimai Festival, and according to Time,
00:07it's held every five years around November and December.
00:10It involves the sacrifice of thousands of animals, sometimes hundreds of thousands.
00:15They're meant as an offering to the Hindu deity Gadimai.
00:18But the tradition has drawn criticism from animal rights activists.
00:21According to Al Jazeera, in 2016, Nepal's Supreme Court
00:25ordered the government to discourage the practice.
00:27So far, the court's order has not prevented the festival from going forward.
00:31Humane Society International says the most recent installment, in 2019,
00:35involved the slaughter of about 250,000 animals.
00:39The Gadimai Festival looks set to go forward once again this year.
00:42But HSI India says they and the group People for Animals
00:45will be assisting border police in preventing animals
00:48from being smuggled in from India to be killed.