NEW DELHI: Letting tens of thousands of cows scavenge for garbage in the polluted streets of India’s capital is, to many Hindus, ‘no way to treat a sacred animal’. But finding good homes for stray cattle has proved difficult in this metropolis of about 14 million people. A new breed of urban cowboys may have just the trick.

Under court order to clear wandering cattle from Delhi’s streets, the municipal government has deployed truckloads of cattle catchers to patrol the streets, and lasso the strays. Hired hands, equipped with long-barrelled, spring-loaded guns, then shoot computer chips down their stomachs before they are herded off for auction.

Chief veterinarian Dr Suresh Kumar Yadav said the chips would force buyers to keep their cows corralled and give Delhi the most successful roundup in the city’s 3,000-year history.

The city auctions off captured strays for an average of $45 a head, with a catch: Buyers must prove they live out of state and sign an oath that they’re taking the cow with them. And they have to pay about $10 for the computer chip. The new owners’ names are listed in a computer database, along with their cows’ serial numbers. The owner is fined $115 each time an animal is caught wandering Delhi’s streets again.

Yadav has no idea how many cows live on the capital’s streets. Estimates run in the tens of thousands.

The city had previously paid nongovernmental groups to take care of the cattle in holding areas that were supposed to serve as refuges, where homeless bovines could have some comfort. To most of India’s Hindu majority, cows deserve to be pampered.

But their handlers claimed that more than 20,000 of the captured strays died in just a year.

In March, animal rights activists found a stray cow so sick it could barely move. Surgeons pulled 176 pounds of plastic bags, pins, shoe straps and other junk from the animal’s stomach.

A diet of Delhi’s garbage can taint milk that freelancers surreptitiously squeeze from the strays and sell to dairies. Such milk can spread diseases such as tuberculosis, which is the leading cause of death in India, claiming 500,000 lives each year.

Forcing computer chips down cows’ throats could help save many lives, both human and bovine.

The chips are hidden in chalk-white, round-tipped ceramic capsules the size of a shotgun shell. Developed by the Spanish company Rumitag, the capsules stick in the reticulum, one of four compartments in a cow’s stomach and the one best-suited to storing hard objects without hurting the animal.

Workers place the capsules in one end of a gun, which a cattle hand firmly shoves about two feet down the cow’s throat, pulling a spring-loaded handle to release the capsule.

Some cows take to it like kids to candy. Others buck and try to gore the cattle hands.

Once the chip is in place, identifying the cow is as simple as waving an electronic wand near its belly. The device picks up a signal from the chip and displays the details on a hand-held reader.

Not everyone shares Yadav’s vision of a cow-free Delhi, especially the thousands of people who make a living running bootleg dairies.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service