ABSTRACT
For over two millennia, Chinese religious discourses on animals and animal products have attempted to balance conflicting injunctions: compassion for other living beings, promoting an ideal of vegetarian purity, and the perceived need for meat for the living and the dead, who require sacrifices for their sustenance in the other world. This chapter will sketch how various discourses, especially Daoist ones, have found solutions by attaching different values to different animals and prioritizing care for certain species, notably bovines, by prohibiting their slaughtering and encouraging humane treatment for working animals.
