Buddhism
The Buddha condemned ritual animal sacrifice. The First Precept of Buddhism prohibits any type of killing. More specifically, Brahmanism, the dominant religion in northern India at the time of the Buddha included sacrifice (Yajna) including animal slaughter. The Tipiṭaka records one sacrifice where ’five hundred bulls, five hundred steers and numerous heifers, goats and rams were brought to the sacrificial post for slaughter’ (A.IV,41). The Buddha criticized these bloody rituals as being "wasteful, ineffective and cruel" (A.II,42).
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“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)