India: Animals everywhere

A camel rests road-side outside Jaipur.

The streets were a zoo! Sometimes, it really felt this way. We saw our first cows on the streets during our taxi drive from the airport. By the end of the trip, I was so used to walking around cows that I barely noticed them. (Well, kind of. It was still a little amusing at times, especially when the cows had bright colors on them left over from Holi celebrations.)

Cows were quite common.

Cows
India's population is about 80 percent Hindu (according to data from 2001), a religion in which cows are considered sacred. Consequently, they're allowed to wander the streets. This is quite entertaining when a cow is standing in the street and the raucous Indian traffic has to actively avoid it. (Vehicles yield to cows, though I seriously question if they yield to people. I had some close calls, but I never fully tested that to find out.)

We ran into cows on the streets and sides of the roads. We even met up with some cows on a prayer trail in Dharamshala.

Dogs in Pushkar still have pink fur days after Holi.

Dogs
However, stray dogs might be the most common animal on the streets.

Puppies on the street were rare, but dogs were everywhere.

These are some pups fully adapted to life on the streets. In many cases, we saw dogs sleeping on the side of the road while autos whizzed past, nearly clipping their tails. In a few cases, dogs were sleeping on the median or in the road.

The numbers are so great that they tend to be everywhere. Not surprisingly, the people treat them as pests (and they probably often are). Sadly, this often leads to some kicks or other rough behavior, which our group of Americans did not take very well.

Cats
Despite the large numbers of dogs, I saw relatively few cats. Because of this, I was very excited the three or so times I spotted one on the streets.

Pigs and trash on the street in Pushkar

Pigs
Yep, there were pigs on some of the streets, among the trash and stray dogs.

Goats
I saw some goats, but I think they had owners (not strays).

Squirrel or chipmunk?

 Squirrels
These looked like a mix between squirrels and chipmunks, but the Hindi speakers swear they're squirrels, just the Indian variety. We debated this many times.

In Deer Park.

Peacocks
I didn't see the national bird of India much during my travels. They weren't wandering the streets with the cows and dogs. However, I did hear peacocks a few times. And I had some excellent views of them while wandering around Deer Park in Delhi one evening.

Elephants take visitors up to Amber Fort.

Elephants
My best elephant sighting was when I saw a couple being ridden down the streets of Jaipur at dusk. They were on the road along with the autos and motorbikes. (There had been an elephant festival in Jaipur a couple days before.) The only other ones I saw were carrying tourists to the top of the hill at Amber Fort.

A camel with cart in Pushkar

 Camels
Camels were most plentiful in Rajasthan (the desert state where my two solo locations — Jaipur and Pushkar — were located). Most of the time I saw them, they were pulling carts. I could have taken a camel ride into the desert from Pushkar, but I chose to do some other things instead.

All in a day's work.

Donkeys
We ran into some donkeys doing manual labor. They were mostly near construction sites and carrying loads of rocks or dirt.

A monkey at the temple complex in Dharamsala.

Monkeys
My personal favorite was the monkeys. I'm very amused by the human-like actions of primates. (I would consider a pet monkey if it weren't for the obvious problems of house-breaking, general monkey trouble and fights with cats.) During the first half of my trip, I had a few monkey encounters. We saw some around the outer walls of the Taj Mahal. Dharamshala had some pretty good monkey sightings (in the Himalayan foothills). We watched some monkeys outside our balcony one morning. We also got some close-ups of monkey visitors to the Tibetan Buddhist temple complex.

However, my best monkey experiences were during the solo portion of my trip. Watch for more posts on monkeys in the near future.