Animals don't belong to your culture.
To conclude this post:
Across Indigenous-coded practices, non-Indigenous cultural traditions, and religious systems, the justifications for animal use differ in form but always serve the same purpose. It doesn’t matter if the appeal is to ancestry, harmony with nature, heritage, art, necessity, or divine command because the moral structure is the same: the use of sentient beings is viewed as an acceptable normality as we move attention away from the victim and toward humans and their meaning.
Recognizing historical oppression, cultural significance, or religious belief can explain why practices persist, but it cannot ever transform the domination of sentient beings into ethical behavior. Moral progress has never required the preservation of exploitation for the sake of tradition. It only needs the willingness to question practices once considered normal, sacred, or even inevitable.
Humans are moral agents. Non-human animals are moral patients. To be capable of ethical reasoning is to be accountable for how power is exercised over those who cannot consent or refuse.
Applying the same moral standards across contexts is not cultural erasure, intolerance, or disrespect. It is moral consistency and progress. To exempt any group from ethical evaluation is not solidarity but condescension, implying diminished moral agency.
If respect means not taking advantage of others, then respect for non-human animals cannot be reconciled with their use as resources, symbols, or sacrifices. The ethical question is not how meaningfully and usefully animals are used, but whether they should be used at all.
To defend animals is to be vegan.
(Apologies for any grammatical errors or mistypes, I write these on the go and english is not my first language so mistakes are easy to go unnoticed for a while!)
