The Reality About Nepal's Blood- Consuming Festivals

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  Yaks roam the hills in the Mustang District, in Nepal's Dhaulagiri Zone. Every single day throughout the yearly blood- drinking festival, attendees wait and observe for the yaks. Only male yaks are bled.

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  Jana Asenbrennerova
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  The festival will take location exactly where the yaks roam, about 4,000 meters above sea degree. Here, festival-goers return to their campsite soon after bleeding yaks.

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  Jana Asenbrennerova
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  Guys struggle with a yak before he is bled. About five yaks are caught just about every morning during the festival. Just about every yak supplies about 15 glasses of blood.

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  A girl boils water in a pot for cooking. All of the meals consumed throughout the blood- consuming festival have to be brought up to the campsite from the village of Marpha beneath. The trek uphill requires about four hrs.

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  In the afternoon every person goes back to the campsite. The males drink and play cards for most of the day until eventually late into the night.

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  A man the locals contact " health practitioner " sharpens the blade which he will use to cut the throat of a yak.

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  Blood flows from an incision in a yak's vein into into a cup. The yak will be released soon after he is bled.

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  A female drinks a glass of fresh yak blood. She is attending the festival with her family in hopes that drinking the blood will enable heal her ongoing digestive issues. Some individuals go for the day other people keep the whole week. The normal attendee drinks a glass of blood per day.

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"Blood- consuming festival." Reading people words, it truly is tricky not to get either creeped out or curious particularly about Halloween.

I opted for curiosity. Which is how I found photojournalist Jana Asenbrennerova's stunning photo essay on an obscure custom that requires place every yr in the remote, mist-wrapped highlands of Nepal. These festivals are truly a reflection of the complex romance that Nepal's Buddhists have with eating meat.

Initial, to be clear, we're speaking yak blood here. Yaks are huge, shaggy-haired animals relevant to cattle that live in the higher altitudes of the Himalayas. Up there, yaks graze on herbs that villagers think are great for digestion but aren't immediately digestible by human beings.

Yak blood is believed to include the herbs' medicinal properties and other healthful advantages. "They drink it mainly because they consider the blood has healing properties," says Assenbrennerova. And so when or twice a year, villagers undertake an arduous trek up the hillsides to exactly where the yaks roam. They set up camp for about a week, rustle up the yaks, cautiously slit their neck veins and cup the blood that pours forth, drinking it although it is nevertheless hot.

Then they let the animals go.

"The yaks seem to be to be fine," says Assenbrennerova. "They don't like it, obviously, but they just run away."

She documented one of these festivals in August of final year in the hills above Marpha, a village in the Mustang District, in the Dhaulagiri Zone of northern Nepal. The festival web page was a 4 -hour hike away, at a spot some 4,000 meters above sea level. What she discovered was essentially a village camp out.

"They perform cards it is like a major camp for them," she says. "They get to be away from property."

" It is a bit of a wild celebration scene," adds anthropologist Mark Turin of the Yale Himalaya Initiative.

He's attended the festivals in the previous they are " rather widespread" across the sparsely populated components of central and western Nepal, he says. Generally all around 70 men and women or so will attend, says Turin, who has spent two decades residing in and learning the area. One particular draw is the social element of the activities, he says.

But there's yet another, unspoken inspiration : the prospect of yak meat. "A yak is a significant animal," says Turin. " There is a lot of edible meat on a yak."

Let's back up for a second : The staple Nepalese diet regime consists of rice, lentils and vegetables. Meat is a rarity in the rural elements where the festivals prevail, says Turin. These communities are largely Buddhists, he says and Buddhists are not permitted to destroy animals. They are, nonetheless, allowed to consume the meat of an animal who dies by accident. Over -bleeding, he says, is a very great "way to accidentally finish up with a dead yak."

Assenbrennerova says no animals died for the duration of her 24-hour stay at the campsite. But Turin says that is not normally the case.

" Each and every time I've been to one particular of these festivals," says Turin, " I've seen one particular or two yaks accidentally bled to death."

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