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Paper short abstract

Bhutan’s rituals and meat culture are being remade by Buddhist ethics and global animal-welfare campaigns. Life-release ritual expands as sacrifice to mountain deities is moralised and replaced with symbolic gifts. Animals shift from ritual agents to ethical subjects, creating new pastoral tensions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Buddhist ethics and global animal-welfare discourse are reshaping ritual practice and meat culture in Bhutan, generating polarised multispecies conflicts within a state–monastic regime of moral governance. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, it compares two animal-centred ritual complexes: Buddhist tsethar (life-release) and vernacular sacrifice to mountain and place deities.

Tsethar has expanded from episodic “rescue” to a moral project in which merit is judged by post-release welfare. Civil groups purchase animals en route to slaughter, relocate them to high pastures, and document their well-being for donors, aligning with populist moral campaigns around compassion and welfare. Yet “release” often entails renewed human management: pastoralists may be compelled to host tsethar herds on commons, provide salt and winter care, and pledge never to kill them, shifting labour, costs, and risk onto herders.

A contrasting case from Phobjikha’s Habe rites traces the decline and symbolic transformation of sacrifice under increasingly authoritarian monastic regulation and state-aligned Buddhist norm enforcement. Villagers test substitutions—yak to sheep to hen to eggs—reading misfortune as feedback from deities; monks increasingly conduct the rites and reframe human–deity negotiations in Buddhist idioms without blood.

I argue that these transitions reorder human–animal relations: animist cosmologies recognise animals as agents in exchange, whereas Buddhist compassion safeguards life while rendering animals ethical subjects.