Standing on the highest platform of Wat Phnom, a temple built on the mythical founding location of the Cambodian capital, a woman holds two munias close to her mouth and murmurs prayers into the birds’ feathers. Then, raising her hands to the sky, she releases her grasp and the birds flap their wings.
Like hundreds of people that day, she is practising “life release”, which involves setting free a captive animal to make merit, atone for one’s sins, right one’s karma. One of the munias makes its way towards Phnom Penh’s busy traffic below while its companion stalls, veers to the left and drops to the ground, breathing but motionless.
Without a glance, the woman turns away and leaves.
Widespread throughout Buddhist communities worldwide, the practice involves “freeing” hundreds of millions of animals every year.
An Asian golden weaver in a cage at Wat Phnom, Phnom Penh. Birds like this are commonly sold in Cambodia for “life release” rituals, but the practice causes harm to birds and the environment. Photo: Yann Bigant
An Asian golden weaver in a cage at Wat Phnom, Phnom Penh. Birds like this are commonly sold in Cambodia for “life release” rituals, but the practice causes harm to birds and the environment. Photo: Yann Bigant
Here in Cambodia, nine out of 10 people say they practise life release. But for a ritual of freedom meant to earn spiritual points, there sure are a lot of animals suffering in the process.
Even in the Liezi, an ancient Chinese text dating back to at least the 3rd century AD, a minister is “delighted” to be given doves to release on New Year’s Day as a gesture of kindness, yet a visitor is quick to point out that “the people know you wish to release them, so they vie with each other to catch them, and many of the doves die”.
Dr Kit Magellan, an independent behavioural and invasion ecologist who led a 2019 study of life release across Cambodia and Vietnam, recalls witnessing people violently shaking a cage upside down to “free” the last bird.
“It eventually flew out of the cage and dropped on the ground a metre away,” she says. “People saw it and laughed.”
Elsewhere in the city, over a patch of grass tucked between nondescript buildings and a vegetable garden, Choeun Lien (whose name has been changed) lays his trap. Having stretched mesh between bamboo poles, held on one side by rebar hammered into the ground, he retreats and hides a few metres away.
Long read: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-mag ... mate-birds
How animals suffer for Buddhists to earn spiritual points – in Cambodia ‘life release’ rituals decimate birds
- Bong Burgundy
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How animals suffer for Buddhists to earn spiritual points – in Cambodia ‘life release’ rituals decimate birds
Bringing the news. You stay classy, nas, Cambodia.
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Absolutely awful custom!!! The one thing I hate about Riverside: all the cages with half-dead birds.
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"I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."
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Charles Lindbergh
Which bars are they in?
Carrying the absurdity of religious doctrine to its logical ends, do the animals too not make merit by their sacrifice, thus skipping a few rounds of Samsara themselves?
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Those cages are like most birds on the riverfront, they've both had a “cock-or-too” in them.
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"Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the notion that white people can give anybody their freedom." Stokely Carmichael
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I was at a birthday party for an Okhna's kid years ago. When the kid arrived they released about 2000 birds in front of the venue"for merit". There was a thunderstorm and when I was leaving a few hours later there were hundreds of drenched and lost birds shivering in the bushes. Fucking terrible.
It's the animals that should earn those "spiritual points", not the idiots who "release" them.
Little birds were a delicacy to well off French Libertines. But this is more like an animal sacrifice. Religion tends to get quite murdery.
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