Colourful Animals of Southern India

I have finally seen my cows.

Ooty had cows, horses, ponies, goats, chickens and monkeys. One cow was terrorizing the fruit and vegetable sellers of Main Bazaar Rd. She started munching on a seller's tomatoes and was making a mess of his whole stand when the guy ran out and shooed her away. She then became a bit shirty and attacked a cat sleeping on a ledge, nudging it with her nose quite firmly. The cat flew off the ledge with a definite wtf? look. Literally a mad cow.

Driving from Ooty to Bandipur National Park through the Nilgiri hills we saw lots of lovely wildlife, including elephants. Our driver stopped and pointed out deer and boars and anything else he thought would catch our fancies and gave us a chance to take photos. Contrast that with our extremely expensive official safari done through the forestry service. We were stuffed into open window buses along with a bunch of other people and a driver and a spotter. Every so often the bus would stop and the spotter would vaguely point. The people up near the front would start shooting their cameras wildly while the rest of us were asking "what is it? What are we looking for? Is there something behind that tree?" but no one would tell us anything and the bus would lurch on. We did have a few moments of excitedly identifying animals we knew. We recognized spotted deer from our drive to the park, there was a peacock sauntering across the road and we saw two wild elephants. One of the elephants was quite close and we got to watch her calmly munch on her fodder. The highlight for the spotter was when we came upon two dog-like animals tearing apart a freshly killed deer. "This is rare! You never see this!" were the only words I actually heard him say. It was pretty exciting in a dog eat deer, entrails flying, kinda way. The drive through the park was beautiful but we didn't learn a single new fact about any of the animals we saw (or even what they were) and no one told us a single fact about the park. Our city to city driver, Krishna, was any more helpful.

This past weekend was Pongal or Sankranti, a harvest festival, where people thank the gods Indra, Surya and worship their cows. They draw coloured sand drawings outside their door and parades of young girls bear fruits through the streets while bands play. The third day of the festival seems to be celebrated by dyeing the livestock shades of yellow, pink or red. Yellow predominates for cattle while sheep and goats are spotted the ruddier colours. As soon as we neared the outskirts of Mysore the cows and goats became notably more colourful, frequently quite garishly so, with painted or garlanded horns. Red and gold seemed to be popular for horns but there was one festooned with shiny purple tinsel cascades. Some of the cows were quite psychedelic, particularly the jersey type cows, who were day glow yellow and brown. Some of the sheep were a lovely shade of fuchsia which complemented my outfit quite nicely. That's what I need - a purse sized accessory sheep.