E-Rickshaws Spare Animals Endless Suffering
Approximately 400 animals are forced to toil in market yards and navigate Delhi’s hectic streets full of speeding cars, motorcycles, taxis, and buses for long hours in unforgiving heat without enough food or water. When the animals get sick or are injured in traffic accidents, desperate owners who must feed their families resort to using whips, painful nose ropes, and spiked bits to force them to pull overloaded carts. They don’t receive veterinary care for painful health issues, including cancer, wounds, muscle and joint ailments, abscesses, and yoke gall, and they are typically worked to death.
By being empowered to purchase e-rickshaws, cart owners can release animals from their endless suffering and retire them. So far, PETA India has replaced 29 bullocks and 12 horses with e-rickshaws and retired the animals to a sanctuary outside Delhi where they receive veterinary exams and 24/7 care. They’ll never again have to endure the adversity and dangers of pulling overloaded carts through packed city streets. Instead, they’ll spend the rest of their lives peacefully communing with nature and each other.
Improving Livelihoods and Safety
In addition to being cruel, using animals to transport goods is a dying business. The families who have participated in and benefited from the Delhi Mechanisation Project report that using an e-rickshaw has dramatically increased their earnings and enhanced their social and economic status. Relying on e-rickshaws instead of animals also allows former cart owners to avoid a disruption in profits when animals can’t physically work, including when they contract infectious diseases – such as glanders, a deadly zoonotic disease (i.e. spread from animals to humans) in horses – which are highly prevalent in Delhi. E-rickshaw drivers also enjoy increased opportunities of mobility because they aren’t limited by road restrictions that apply to animal-drawn carts and because such mode of transport is considered as means of last mile connectivity in semi-urban setup like in most part of Delhi.
Families can also rest easy knowing that e-rickshaws are a safe, modern, cruelty-free, and pollution-free solution to transport people and goods throughout Delhi’s urban sprawl and a viable, sustainable means of income.
Getting animals off Delhi’s streets benefits everyone. E-rickshaw drivers can expand their business and better compete with other forms of mechanised transportation, and the risk of traffic accidents between animals and vehicles is eliminated.
See the Project's Success for Yourself!
With the support of the local government and e-rickshaw manufacturers, PETA India hopes to keep expanding our Delhi Mechanisation Project so that there will be no more animal-drawn carts in Delhi one day.
The joy this project brings to animals and families is exceptionally touching, but don’t take our word for it. Check out these fun videos on the ins and outs of the project to see for yourself:
