Pregnancy is a difficult time. That is when nutrition is needed most while the lady in the happy state finds much food distasteful. In Allen Forest Zoo in Kanpur, a pregnant lioness would rather go without food than have the pale chicken meat that is being served now. She, like all the carnivores in the zoo, as well as the lions, lionesses, their cubs, tigers, wolves, panthers, hyenas, jackals and wildcats in Lucknow Zoo and the Etawah Wildlife Safari Park are used to buffalo meat. But that meat, both cheap and legal, is rapidly disappearing from the market. Yogi Adityanath has come to town. Or rather, to the Uttar Pradesh chief minister's chair. The animals' carers are worried that their wards are losing out on nutrition with only chicken and mutton on the menu, although these are more expensive.

Prices may rise further, not just of chicken, mutton and fish but of vegetables too. The chief minister's reach is wide - from the zoos and safari parks to the teeming human markets, from household kitchens and tables to the meat export business. Penalizing illegal slaughterhouses and regulating unscientific abattoirs - serious threats to health - were directions of the National Green Tribunal in 2015. But that may not explain the Yogi's holy fervour. He apparently has no other business as newly-anointed chief minister but catching young men and shutting down meat shops. The Bharatiya Janata Party had not stopped at the ban on the slaughter, transport and storage of cow meat, but had promised to close all illegal as well as mechanized slaughterhouses, the last being inhuman. As a result of the new chief minister's fathomless humanity, the whole of non-vegetarian UP is trembling with the shock of allegedly unlicensed meat shops being closed down, abattoirs being shut, fish and meat shops being burnt in Hathras, a major meat processing plant being sealed because of 'irregularities' in Kairana - and with fish, chicken, mutton and egg traders going on strike in Lucknow in solidarity with their affected colleagues.

With the ban on cow slaughter, a huge segment of the population had been forced to change its diet. Many will now have even less to eat, for buffalo meat was at least affordable. Besides, UP is India's biggest meat-producing and exporting state; around 15 million people work in the industry. Yogi Adityanath has his finger in the diets and livelihoods of numerous people in his own state, most belonging to a minority community. There would not be so much uncertainty if the issue had clearly been one of legality and hygiene. But there is no plan to regularize those parts of the industry that have violated laws. Instead, as with the police squads in the anti-Romeo campaign, the sense of unchecked oppression by representatives of the State is now uppermost. Perhaps, as a Congress Lok Sabha member suggested, lions in UP may shift to palak-paneer. Unlike the poor for whom the Yogi's heart bleeds, they will not have to bother about prices.