Eating livestock was banned🐮

I have recently started to reread a manga I loved, it’s about a girl (proficient in agriculture) going back in time to the 1500s Japan.

I love it for its realistic feel, lack of male gaze, as well as all the historical facts.

One such fact is that the influence of buddism condemned the consumption of livestock, but eating hunted animals was still okay.

Unfortunately, this is one thing she set out to change… and one I found a tad unrealistic. (For example, I really doubt that someone who (presumably) had never consumed meat would love it the first time they tasted it, especially something like liver.)

Anyway, it was the usual disassociation, calling animals ”ingredients”, dismissing the ban as the monks hoarding the good stuff (which to be fair, there were much corruption) etc etc.

At first, the consumption of meat didn’t actually bother me, surprisingly. The deer population had exploded and they were eating their crops, the villagers were starving. And livestock were protected. At that point, hunting deer seemed like the balancing of the eco system, it seemed fair (if that makes sense?).

But what irked me was her reasoning, she who is an agricultural expert, talks about unbalanced diets and lack of animal protein. In the beginning, sure, there was nothing else. But they are literally growing soybeans like crazy later on, and still it’s all about importing livestock and livestock breeding (all for protein). It’s something she isn’t even knowledgeable about, and yet she is going out of her way to push animal products like meat egg and milk, all of which were rarely consumed. Just… Whhhhhyyyyy…

. . .

Sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant. What I found fascinating was the fact that Buddhism condemned eating the animals you raised. And the fact that it was widely followed. Even if you are going to consume meat, it makes sense to not kill and eat someone who trusted you, who was apart of the family.

In a way it feels like common sense, it’s a bit disappointing, both that this mindset didn’t prevail into our modern times and that fact that the people in the manga didn’t react with more horror or guilt when eating their livestock.

(That said, it’s still a really good manga. It’s one of my favorites and I would still recommend it. It was just a bit infuriating when rereading from a vegan perspective— https://mangadex.org/title/a4304d3b-191d-471f-8c78-353d403a35d0/sengoku-komachi-kuroutan-noukou-giga)