Almost three months. That was how long four buffaloes spent tied up in the mud, next to their own owner’s house, in the village of Gokulnagar, Bangladesh.
Their owner, Abdul Alim, used to take them to graze in the nearby fields, but the monsoon season made that impossible. So he chose to leave them there, submerged, feeding them in the same spot all the time. The owner’s mother, Satyia Khatun, later said that the family asked him to sell them so they would not continue suffering, and that the women of the household would not even go near the animals because they were so afraid.
Everything changed when environmental activist Nazmul Hasan photographed the scene and uploaded it to Facebook. That image reached Md Sazzad Hossain, an official from Maheshpur, who personally went to the site and ordered the four animals to be removed from the mud. Now the family has 15 days to create a safe and suitable place to keep the animals, with enough food.
