The Streets Run with Blood, or, Eid-al-Adjha

So, these are a bit overdue--this holiday was observed on November 17th. But, interesting nonetheless.
There is a second Eid holiday (about 2 and a half months after the first Eid) where animals are sacrificed to honor Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his own son. Families buy goats and/or cows depending on their ability to afford them and because (at least in Chittagong) no one has a yard, these animals spend their last few days tied up in front of the apartments where their purchasers live. Here are a couple photos:
Here's one apartment building that had five outside! These photos are all on the residential streets between my house and school. While it's not uncommon to see live animals in the streets, they don't actually live on the streets like this and it was very strange to see them literally lining every street and knowing that in a couple short days they would all be gone.....
In addition to the increased number of animals out, there were other new and Eid-specific sites to be seen. What is this guy carrying?.....
Here's a closer look.....
Still can't tell? Here's a close-up with a better angle:....it's a mobile pedal-powered sharpening stone--you can't slit a big animal's throat very easily with a dull machete!
I especially like this third guy's sunglasses....pretty stylish. These guys were all over town in the days leading up to the holiday--they walk through the streets yelling their service and people come down and employ him. This last photo has a good image of the knife-on-legs that is common here (I don't know the bangla name--it's on its side on the brick wall on the left). People sit on the floor and use their feet to steady it and do everything from peel vegetables to crack open coconuts on the curved part or the flat, chisel part depending on the task.

There were also new items for sale around the neighborhood such as hay and chopping blocks. The cows need something to eat and it's hard to hack up an entire cow without a few cheap cutting boards.....
I also saw young boys gathering fresh green grass to sell to people to feed the cows. At least they weren't starving them in their final days.
Now comes the grisly part--I didn't actually venture out much the day this all happened, but got to see some action from my apartment, which was enough for me.
First, you have to wrestle it to the ground and tie its legs together:
Notice in this previous photo the ditch of water in the lower part of the photo's color (regular dirty gray color)
Then comes the slitting of the throat to allow the blood to flow out. This is the only proper "halal" method to kill an animal in Islam.
Notice the blood running into the drainage ditch....
And here's a farther away image of the street - notice the ditch running with blood.
This was happening all over town on nearly every street. As you can imagine, the smell of hundreds of huge cows (and goats!) being slaughtered all on the same morning permeated even up to my 12th floor apartment and continued into the following day. The nonstop bleating of goats wasn't helping the atmosphere, either.....
The final step is to chop it all up:
The families are allowed to keep 1/3 of the meat for themselves, 1/3 of the meat for their extended family and have to give 1/3 of it to the needy. So at least for this week the poor and hungry get a big dose of protein and iron!
I did get to share in some of the bounty--a colleague's Bangladeshi family sent some various beef dishes and the fresh, unprocessed meat was really excellent. There was a big Anthrax scare in Bangladesh a few months ago, and no one ate any beef for awhile, but once this Eid came around, they seemed to have forgotten all about it and did their muslim duties......
Maybe if I'm around for the next Eid-al-Adha I'll be more adventurous to experience it closer.
One somewhat positive thing I saw the day after Eid were three vultures circling. This is positive because the vulture population in India and Bangladesh has plummeted to less than half of what it was just a few years ago. This is apparently due to the antibiotics and estrogens people feed cows and livestock and then the vultures eat the meat and are very sensitive to these chemicals and are dying in huge numbers......not the prettiest animal, but they all have their link in the food web and they are in real danger of going extinct in the near future.