This page looks at Buddhist attitudes towards animals.
Last updated 2009-11-23
This page looks at Buddhist attitudes towards animals.
Although Buddhism is an animal-friendly religion, some aspects of the tradition are surprisingly negative about animals.
Buddhism requires us to treat animals kindly:
Buddhists see human and non-human animals as closely related:
Buddhists believe that is wrong to hurt or kill animals, because all beings are afraid of injury and death:
All living things fear being beaten with clubs.
All living things fear being put to death.
Putting oneself in the place of the other,
Let no one kill nor cause another to kill.Dhammapada 129
Buddhist behaviour towards and thinking about animals is not always positive.
The doctrine of karma implies that souls are reborn as animals because of past misdeeds. Being reborn as an animal is a serious spiritual setback.
Because non-human animals can't engage in conscious acts of self-improvement they can't improve their karmic status, and their souls must continue to be reborn as animals until their bad karma is exhausted. Only when they are reborn as human beings can they resume the quest for nirvana.
This bad karma, and the animal's inability to do much to improve it, led Buddhists in the past to think that non-human animals were inferior to human beings and so were entitled to fewer rights than human beings.
Early Buddhists (but not the Buddha himself) used the idea that animals were spiritually inferior as a justification for the exploitation and mistreatment of animals.
Buddhists say that this is morally wrong if the animal concerned might come to any harm. However, Buddhists also acknowledge the value that animal experiments may have for human health.
So perhaps a Buddhist approach to experiments on animals might require the experimenter to:
The bad karmic consequences for the experimenter seem to demand a high level of altruistic behaviour in research laboratories.
Not all Buddhists are vegetarian and the Buddha does not seem to have issued an overall prohibition on meat-eating. The Mahayana tradition was (and is) more strictly vegetarian than other Buddhist traditions.
The early Buddhist monastic code banned monks from eating meat if the animal had been killed specifically to feed them, but otherwise instructed them to eat anything they were given.
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