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Buddhism: Dialogue with Ethics

Buddhist Views on Animal Life and Death

  • 3 things to know
  • Component 2

Overview

Buddhist responses to the prescribed issues of animal life and death, including intensive farming, hunting and blood sports, animal experiments and cloning, and organ transplants, drawing on ahimsa, the Vanijja Sutta, Ashoka's edicts and dana.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Process

Why does Damien Keown reject using compassion for humans to justify killing animals in experiments?

Process

Which trade named in the Vanijja Sutta bears on raising animals for slaughter?

Process

What Buddhist objection is raised to cloning animals?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Why do many Buddhists condemn intensive farming?

    Model answer

    It confines sentient beings in crowded conditions and treats them as products, causing great suffering that goes against compassion and ahimsa.

  2. 2

    Which trade named in the Vanijja Sutta bears on raising animals for slaughter?

    Model answer

    Business in meat, one of five trades a lay follower should avoid alongside weapons, human beings, intoxicants and poison.

  3. 3

    How might a Theravada Buddhist who eats meat still object to intensive farming?

    Model answer

    Buying meat not killed specifically for oneself is traditionally permitted, but a Buddhist may still refuse to support a system whose cruelty goes beyond the killing itself and choose plant-based or higher-welfare food.

  4. 4

    Why do many Buddhists reject hunting and fishing as sports?

    Model answer

    Killing an animal for pleasure is deliberate killing driven by greed and delusion, so it breaks the first precept with no need that could excuse it.

  5. 5

    How did the emperor Ashoka apply Buddhist values to royal hunting?

    Model answer

    His eighth Rock Edict records that he replaced the royal pleasure tours, which had included hunting, with journeys to teach the dhamma.

  6. 6

    What is life release in Buddhism?

    Model answer

    A practice found in Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism of freeing animals destined for slaughter, to make merit and express compassion.

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