Shepherding is one of the oldest professions !

Two of the the most famous avatars from Above were shepherds or shepherd like – Jesus and Krishna, who was a cattlemen in his childhood. Does it qualify it to be called as a holy job then?

In the plains you don’t have shepherds because it is far more efficient to grow grains and cereals than to allow sheep to graze, thus the raising of sheep was confined to rugged and mountainous areas. On our way to Badrinath trekking, we met several shepherds (known as bakri-wala), which gave us a glimpse of their life.

So how is their work?

A shepherd takes out his sheep herds in the morning to a grass field, make them graze and come back in evening?

NO….

On a fine morning mostly in April, he leaves his house with the herds of sheep, owned by people from his village, moves different places, with green grass for the sheeps to graze and comes back after six months, before the winter peeps up. For this he earns generally Rs. 100 per sheeps for whole six months. They generally take herds of 400/500 sheeps, by which they earn Rs.40,000-50,000 (~1000 USD) in six months.

So they are in duty for six months 24 hours, away from their house, out in jungle among wild animals to earn around $1000.

In Dhakwani, on the midst of Himalayan mountains, in our badrinath trekking, a shepherd was our only hope for food. With his sheeps he went till Leh (Tibbet border) for grazing the sheeps and was marching back to home. He told us that it’s very rare but tigers do attack the sheeps in the night. However most of the time they are protected by dogs; few dogs together can shoo off a tiger. All the sheeps look almost the same to us, however he said he recognizes all the sheep. If one gets lost, he would know exactly which one got lost – strange is not it?
BTW, black bear is very common in Himalaya, but if at all they attack they attack only the human On the way to Badrinath, from Auli to Joshimath we took a shortcut, we were warned by few about bear attack on humans, which had happened in past. But we were lucky

Recent Entries

• It’s time to start farming….
• zFeeder – Making PHP 5.3 + compatible, solving ‘Function ereg_replace() is deprecated’
• How to multilingualize or localize URL in Gallery2 – enhancement of multilang module to create multilingual URLs, Multi-language URL for SEO with Multi Language Module
• Fix for mergelog, fails with error “abort due to a problem” for dummy records of apache access logs
• Shepherds life in mountain
• The modern marriage culture among mate
• Do you know that barter system still exists in most villages in uttarakhand, may be true for many other parts of India also
• How to catch copy paste from explorer using shell extension? ICopyHook alternative for files and folder
• How to convert ASCII/UNICODE string to hex string? Function/API to convert to hex string
• How to solve ‘ReadFile hangs’ for named pipe client/server – sample working code for named pipe

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 12:24 am and is filed under Do you know that. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.