It happens every fifth November, and it's slated to happen again this year: Gadhimai, the massive, month-long Hindu festival, is set to occur at the end of 2014, and will bring with it the single largest animal sacrifice in the world. Typically, the festival results in the slaughter of an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 animals -- mostly pigs, water buffaloes, chickens, goats and pigeons -- in honor of the power goddess for whom the ritual is named. According to some reports, the last Gadhimai sacrifice, in 2009, saw the deaths of closer to 500,000 animals.
There is more to discuss about the festival than the horrifying numbers, but the numbers are an easy place to start. Each Gadhimai, the festivities begin with the slaughter of several smaller animals: in 2009, a priest started with two rats, two pigeons, one pig, one rooster and one lamb. Then, after the sacrifice officially began on November 24, 250 residents of the village Bariyapur entered an enclosure surrounded by brick walls and decapitated 10,000 buffalo calves; some say they killed 20,000 by the end of the day. That number doesn't include the thousands and thousands of other sacrifices that occur throughout the village and in the tent cities set up nearby -- the tent cities were 5 million pilgrims, mostly from India, offer their own contributions to the goddess.