Does religion require eating meat or animal sacrifice?

The objection

“My faith involves eating meat, or even ritual animal sacrifice. Telling me to go vegan is telling me to abandon my religion and my culture, which you’ve no right to do.”

The answer

A religious duty deserves to be taken seriously and described accurately, and nobody has to leave a faith to eat fewer animals. What the major traditions ask for is narrower than the objection suggests, and many of their followers lean the other way: in a Pew Research Center survey of India (2021), 92% of Jains, 59% of Sikhs and 44% of Hindus said they were vegetarian [1]. Islam’s main sacrifice, qurbani, falls at one festival a year [2], and aqiqah, a sacrifice for a newborn child, is made once, usually on the seventh day after the birth [13], which leaves most of a Muslim household’s meat a matter of choice, as it is for anyone. What the Bible says about eating meat has its own answer.

Where religious slaughter goes ahead without a stun, the cost to the animal is real. The Farm Animal Welfare Council, the UK government’s welfare advisers, concluded in 2003 that the throat cut “would result in very significant pain and distress” before the animal loses consciousness, and called slaughter without stunning unacceptable [3]. The same report found that stunning methods for sheep and cattle that leave the heart beating had been accepted and routinely adopted in many halal slaughterhouses [3]. In England and Wales, in the Food Standards Agency’s survey week in February 2024, 65% of sheep killed for halal meat were stunned first, and more than four in five halal meat chickens were stunned at the electrical settings the slaughter regulation prescribes, by our calculation from the agency’s government figures [4]. The answer on kosher and halal slaughter sets out how long an animal cut without a stun stays conscious.

What is qurbani?

Qurbani is the animal sacrifice Muslims make during Eid al-Adha, a four-day festival honouring Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command, and the animal is usually a sheep, goat or cow, according to a risk assessment by the UK’s Food Standards Agency (2022) [2]. Its meat is traditionally divided into three, with one share given to charity, one kept at home and one given to relatives or friends [2]. In Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation, the Quran tells those who offer sacrificial camels to eat of them and to feed both those who do not beg and those who do (22:36), then says what the offering is for: “It is not their meat nor their blood, that reaches Allah: it is your piety that reaches Him” (22:37) [5]. In a small consumer questionnaire for the agency in 2021, 43 of the 71 people who answered had paid for an animal to be sacrificed outside the UK and the meat given to people in need [2].

What does ahimsa mean for Hindus?

For Hindus, ahimsa means not injuring living creatures, and the Laws of Manu, an ancient Hindu law code, puts “Abstention from injuring (creatures)” first in “the summary of the law for the four castes” (10.63) [12] and applies it to food without forbidding meat outright. At sacred rites it goes beyond permission: a man duly engaged to officiate or dine at a rite who then refuses to eat meat “becomes after death an animal during twenty-one existences” (5.35), meat consecrated with Vedic texts may be eaten (5.36), and killing for a sacrifice is not slaughtering in the ordinary sense (5.39) [7]. Yet the same passage says “Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures” and tells the reader to shun it (5.48), counts everyone from the person who permits the killing to the one who eats the meat as a slayer of the animal (5.51), and concludes that eating meat is no sin but “abstention brings great rewards” (5.56) [7]. Practice spans the same range: in Pew’s survey, 44% of Hindus in India said they were vegetarian, from 71% in the north to 18% in the east, and 83% were either vegetarian or limited which meats they ate or when (2021) [1].

What is the first Buddhist precept?

The first of the five precepts that practising lay Buddhists observe is “I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living creatures” [8]. In the Pali scriptures the Buddha also names business in meat among the five trades a lay follower should not take up, alongside weapons, human beings, intoxicants and poison (AN 5.177) [9]. The precept concerns killing rather than eating, and the same scriptures let monks eat meat unless they have seen, heard or suspected that the animal was killed for them, while saying that anyone who kills an animal specially for the Buddha or his disciples does great wrong, partly because of the pain the animal feels as it is led along and slaughtered (MN 55) [10]. Practice varies, and in Pew’s survey of India a quarter of Buddhists said they were vegetarian (2021) [1].

Why are Jains vegetarian?

Jains are vegetarian because ahimsa, non-harming, is the first of the five vows that Jain monks take and the cardinal rule for how Jains treat other living beings [6]. The Akaranga Sutra, a Jain scripture, teaches that “all breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain”, and calls this “the pure, unchangeable, eternal law” (in Hermann Jacobi’s translation) [11]. Many Jains go further than meat. In Pew’s survey of India, 92% of Jains said they were vegetarian and 67% that they avoided root vegetables such as garlic and onion, which Jain teaching discourages because pulling up a plant’s roots destroys the plant (2021) [1].