Caring for wildlife is a credo of the Bishnois' faith
JAJIWAL, India - Early one recent morning, a motorcycle pulled up outside a temple in the northwestern Indian desert and deposited a 6-month-old gazelle that appeared to have been attacked by a feral dog and was bleeding from the mouth. A temple worker laid the fawn on the ground and fed it water from his palm.
Inside the open-air temple, dozens of the gazelles, known as chinkaras, and a long-horned blackbuck antelope ambled around a sandy enclosure, all having been brought there for care after being wounded or orphaned. Leathery-skinned women wearing jingling bangles, men in white turbans and a rickshaw driver in a dress shirt took turns feeding the injured animals handfuls of roasted chickpeas and offering prayers.
These were not ordinary animal lovers. For the Bishnois - a community of about 700,000 Hindus scattered mainly across the Thar desert - caring for wildlife is a credo of their ancient faith, which reveres the desert's native antelope species as gods.
