By Ashraf Padanna/Kochi
Dr Shashi Tharoor, India’s junior minister for human resource development, has been named “person of the year” by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India for using the power and prestige of his office to advocate for the protection of animals.
Tharoor encouraged the director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training to examine PETA’s Central Board of Secondary Education-approved
Compassionate Citizen humane-education programme for incorporating into its textbooks and has also encouraged the use of methods without harming animals for teaching students and training teachers, animal rights activists said in a statement yesterday.
“We are thankful to Dr Tharoor for his work and for recognising that animals deserve kindness and consideration,” the group’s chief executive officer Poorva Joshipura said in the statement while announcing the award. “If there were more government officials like him, India would be a shining example of compassion and progress to the entire world.”
Tharoor’s other efforts to help animals include writing a letter to Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad urging him to implement non-animal methods of teaching in medical courses. In 2012, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a directive instructing establishments associated with teaching of medical, pharmacy and other courses in life sciences to follow the guidelines for discontinuation of dissection and animal experimentation in these institutions and introduce use of alternatives.
“Despite this, some universities and colleges still allow professors to use rabbits, rats, guinea pigs and other animals in cruel classroom experiments to train students.
In addition, Dr Tharoor urged the National Council for Teacher Education to ban the use of animals for dissection, in training teachers,”it said.
Tharoor said the use of animal dissection in teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels is completely avoidable, and the University Grants Commission (UGC) has already taken up the matter with universities that are teaching life sciences.