Yikes:

The animals were bused to southern Nepal in the thousands: rats, starved goats and pigeons stuffed in bags.

But that was just part of the sacrifice. A few hundred butchers then gathered on Tuesday with curved knives to decapitate water buffalo during what is believed to be the world’s largest ritual slaughter, the weekslong Gadhimai festival in the town of Bariyarpur, near Nepal’s southern border with India.

As the butchers hacked away in a closed arena about the size of a soccer field, devotees tried climbing walls topped with barbed wire to catch a glimpse.

“It’s always fun to behead animals,” said Ram Aashish Das, who said he had slaughtered 30 buffalo this week. “If the tradition is so bad, why are so many people coming here?”