‘Donald Trump’ became a viral sensation overnight. Crowds came from afar to marvel at his visage. They could barely fathom that one like him walked the earth. They were in awe of his blond fringe and fair white skin. They marvelled at his weight. And they were in a state of shock when they learned that he might soon be sacrificed. But the fates had other plans, and the collective globe sighed in relief when he was spared.Now, while this lede might read like one is describing the leader of the free world, one is merely doing a Yudhishthira here: Donald Trumpo jīvati iti, netā vā mahisho vā.For those who have forgotten their Mahabharata or Sanskrit, the Donald in question is not the American president, does not eat exclusively off the McDonald’s menu, and has never bombed Iran or tanked the global economy. He is a buffalo in Bangladesh who became an overnight sensation thanks to his resemblance to Trump and is seven times heavier than his namesake.What began as a routine Eid purchase soon became a global viral sensation. Farm owner Ziauddin Mridha said the majestic beast set him back by 1.5 million taka, or about $12,300, and he has now been compensated, with the Bangladesh government deciding to send Donald to Dhaka’s national zoo instead of letting him end up on someone’s plate.We live in the era of viral animals, from Larry the Cat, the permanent fixture at 10 Downing Street, to Moo Deng, the cute pygmy hippo in Thailand, and Punch, the lonely monkey whose inability to make friends made the world go aww. Donald Trump the buffalo might be the latest addition to this pantheon. But long before the algorithm turned animals into celebrities, humans were already turning them into gods, omens, and pardoned prisoners.That is where the rabbit hole begins.
Man, beast, and god
To understand why one buffalo going viral could suddenly become too meaningful to kill, one has to go back to the beginning, when animals were not content but cosmology. Long before Twitter came around, animals helped us decipher the world. We were the original monkey see, monkey do, though, to be fair to our simian cousins, they never did anything as awful as invent LinkedIn. The earliest cave paintings aren’t narcissistic selfies or breakfast pics but sketches of animals: horses, bison, aurochs, deer, lions and wild pigs.
One of the oldest known figurative paintings, a depiction of an unknown bovine, was discovered in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave and dated to be more than 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old.
Animals were our first guides and textbooks, teaching us how to hunt, when the seasons were changing, and why communism wouldn’t work.Animals inspired us and, in turn, manifested our first gods. The lion could stand for courage, the serpent for danger, the bull for force, and the cow for abundance. Once animals became symbols, gods were never far behind.One of the most iconic images from the Indus Valley Civilisation is the Pashupati seal, which many historians interpret as Shiva, the lord of beasts. The horned, seated figure is surrounded by an elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, buffalo and other creatures, suggesting that one of our earliest ideas of divinity was one who could command the wildebeest like Komaram Bheem in RRR.Across the ancient world, gods rarely travelled alone. Sometimes animals were their vehicles, sometimes their symbols, sometimes their bodies, and sometimes the entire warning label attached to their power. In Hinduism, the entire divine vocabulary is around animals: gods rode them as vahanas, had their bodies as avatars, and often turned them into sacred symbols.This was hardly exclusive to ancient India. Egyptian gods often looked as if they had been assembled in a divine costume department: Horus had the falcon’s head, Anubis the jackal’s, Bastet the cat’s, Sobek the crocodile’s, Hathor the cow’s horns, Khnum the ram’s head, Taweret the hippopotamus’s body, and Apis the whole bull.The Greeks, as they are wont to do, made things more scandalous, and Zeus treated the animal kingdom like a divine disguise kit, becoming a bull, swan or eagle whenever the plot required moral collapse. Rome, being Rome, turned animals into statecraft. The eagle became the soul of the legion, while the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus gave the empire an origin story with milk, murder and excellent branding.China, too, mapped cosmic order through beasts: the dragon stood for imperial authority and rain, the phoenix for renewal, the tiger for martial courage and the tortoise for endurance. The Four Symbols made animals guardians of direction itself, because even space apparently needed wildlife management. And later on, a fifth, a noodle-loving panda, was added for whitewashing the Middle Kingdom’s image across the globe.And in Norse mythology, Jörmungandr, the Midgard or World Serpent, encircles the earth. In Ragnarok, Thor kills the serpent but ends up dying from its poison, unlike the MCU Thor, who is condemned to keep appearing in sequels till Chris Hemsworth shuffles off his mortal coil. And given that animals and gods were entwined, it was only a matter of time before man started sacrificing animals for gods.
Sacrifice and pardon
The English word sacrifice comes from the Latin sacer and facere, meaning “to make sacred”, which sounds a lot better than killing something and hoping the universe listens. The animal was the envelope and God the addressee.Sacrifice was a transaction of different sorts: food for gods, blood for guilt, life for favour, smoke for prayer. In Mesopotamia, offerings went to gods such as Enlil, Enki, Inanna-Ishtar, Shamash and Marduk, because the gods were imagined not as distant abstractions but as powers who had to be honoured, fed, appeased and kept broadly onside.In Egypt, offerings to gods like Amun-Ra, Osiris, Isis, Hathor and Ptah were part of maintaining ma’at, the cosmic order that stopped the world from sliding back into chaos.In Greece, sacrifices were made to Zeus for power and protection, Athena for wisdom and victory, Artemis for the hunt and childbirth, Apollo for prophecy and healing, Demeter for harvest, and Dionysus for fertility, ecstasy and whatever one calls ancient civilisation’s more respectable version of a long weekend.
Ancient India too had its own rituals like the Ashvamedha, where a horse was allowed to roam for a year under the king’s protection, and if the horse returned unchallenged, the king could claim universal sovereignty, which sounds a lot less messy than repeated meetings of the United Nations Security Council.With paganism evolving into the Abrahamic faiths, the ritual of sacrifice changed and didn’t.In Judaism, animals were offered to Yahweh as burnt offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings, and, one assumes, offerings to get Seinfeld renewed. The most enduring image was the scapegoat of Yom Kippur, described in Leviticus: one goat was sacrificed, while another was ritually burdened with the sins of the community and sent into the wilderness. Long before modern politics discovered the usefulness of blaming migrants, minorities, interns, previous governments or the algorithm, humanity had already placed collective guilt on a goat and asked it to leave town.One would imagine the gods were happy because Seinfeld kept getting renewed, while the Jews were responsible for everything worthwhile to come out of Western civilisation. In fact, it was a Jewish gentleman who got the ball rolling for Christianity as well, though Christianity did perform a theological transformation of sacrifice.Jesus became the “Lamb of God”, the innocent victim whose death replaced the repeated blood offerings of the old altar, the one who died for all sins, leading to the terrible joke that if one doesn’t sin, Jesus died for nothing.The animals instead became metaphors, with the lamb surviving as innocence, the shepherd as divine care, and the sacrificial victim as salvation. Christianity moved sacrifice from ritual slaughter into theology, which is why the language of blood, redemption and offering remained long after most Christians stopped bringing livestock to priests.Meanwhile, in the third Abrahamic faith, sacrifice remained essential, which brings us to Eid al-Adha. The festival commemorates Ibrahim’s willingness to submit to God’s command, but instead an animal takes his place. The meat is traditionally shared among friends and family, making it an act of remembrance and obedience.In all three Abrahamic traditions, then, the animal either dies, carries guilt, or becomes the memory of a sacrifice averted.But while sacrifice is understood, how did pardons become the norm?While there are numerous versions of it across the globe, the modern version can be tied to the Thanksgiving pardon of turkeys, though when one knows the entire history, one wonders if Thanksgiving is the correct word to describe the event.
Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s 1914 portrait, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, now on display at Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts
The story goes that in 1621, the English settlers at Plymouth were barely getting by — like Delhi Gymkhana members forced to partake at the Press Club — when the Wampanoag tribe, led by Ousamequin, decided to help them out. The tribe was also weakened thanks to disease and rivalries, and the first “Thanksgiving” wasn’t a Norman Rockwell painting with gravy boats but an awkward political arrangement, the kind we see in coalition governments during breakfast.While history states that it was probably fowl, including turkey, ducks or geese, and even deer, the turkey became the edible mascot because it was native, large, practical and could feed a lot of people at the same time.What began as a harvest meal hardened into national myth, especially in the 19th century, when Thanksgiving was promoted as a unifying American ritual. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving in 1863 during the Civil War, and the familiar menu, including turkey, became part of the holiday’s sentimental machinery.Legend has it that Abe’s son Tad pleaded for a Christmas turkey named Jack to be spared. JFK, in 1963, saw one wearing a sign that said, “Good eating, Mr President”, and decided it should see another birthday.
From viral sensation to zoo resident: Bangladesh’s ‘Trump’ buffalo spared from Eid sacrifice
Reagan later joked about pardons with a turkey around when reporters asked about figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.George H W Bush formalised pardoning a turkey in 1989, and soon it became part of the national firmament. And like most things American, like Ozempic and diabetes, Thanksgiving, turkeys and pardons became part of the world’s pageantry.Thanks largely to the algorithm and the spectacle that followed, not unlike the chaotic list of events that saw his namesake become the leader of the free world, he will live another day. But his survival shows us that humanity never gets past its old tics: on some days, we sacrifice animals to appease the gods, and on others, we spare one to feel a little more human.
