Shelter for the Sacred Cow

A goshala, cow house, is an institution dedicated to the lifelong shelter and care of cattle, chiefly cows no longer productive for milk, maintained by Hindu and Jain religious trusts, temples and lay charitable societies across South Asia as a direct, practical expression of the reverence for cattle central to both traditions' broader ethical commitments, in Hinduism grounded in the cow's association with several deities and with the concept of the cow as a source of sustenance deserving protection and gratitude rather than disposal once economically unproductive, and in Jainism grounded more generally in ahimsa, nonviolence, which holds that an animal's usefulness to humans creates no corresponding right to abandon or kill it once that usefulness ends. Goshalas function as a practical solution to a real economic tension the underlying religious commitment creates: dairy farming naturally produces ageing, non milking cows and unwanted male calves that conventional livestock economics elsewhere in the world would send to slaughter, and goshalas exist specifically to give such animals continued lifelong care rather than requiring devotees' religious principles to yield to ordinary agricultural economics.