Some people have asked as to why one should condemn animal sacrifice when one eats meat. A few months ago, some had the gall to post pictures of a cow in one frame and the horrible Gadhimai festival in the other frame.
The question asked was — you support a ban on the Gadhimai festival but not on cow slaughter? What hypocrites!
The point here is not that an animal is dying in each case. The point is why. Animals are used as food, animals are used as offerings to gods and animals are protected for religious reasons. Food is a fundamental human need for existence. We cannot do without food. We could certainly do without animal sacrifice for religious or cultural reasons — because those reasons are vacuous and (in many cases) based on unsubstantiated claims about the cosmos.
Let me put it this way — many people eat meat but don’t wear fur coats any more. Some don’t wear leather belts or shoes any more. We don’t put animal heads as trophies in our homes any more. Do you see the moral difference here? But when the reasons are religious, they seem to become acceptable!
If killing anything was a crime in itself, we should stop eating even vegetarian food as it involves killing plants. Then we’d starve to death. The purpose is what matters.
There is a respectable argument that vegetarianism is superior to non-vegetarianism, because in the latter case, not only is the animal killed, but the animal is first bred to be killed — in which process it consumes hundreds of plants. So when you eat meat, you eat the animal + the plants it consumed — instead of just one plant.
But this is a scientific argument, at least an empirical one. It is not one that can be used by those who oppose cow slaughter (for example), because their reasons for that are not environmental or altruistic. They are religious.