taking lives of animals is a big thing in Buddhism
How do explain (South) Korea and Japan that eat plenty of meat and have a Buddhist majority? Sri Lanka also has lots of Buddhists, and also eats lots of meat. This seems like nonsense to me.
The himalayas they also traditionally kill animals for food. They basically consumed 3 things barley, yak products (meat and milk) and tea.
They didn't have much choice; was hard to grow anything else up in the mountains.But they were conscious about it and still careful but other animal lives.
It's not only because they care about the animal, but also very much about they are afraid of the karma they create for themselves.
Now in the refugee areas they prefer to buy their meat from the Islamic community ironically enough.
The first precept of Buddhism is not to kill humans or animals. Not everybody is going to be crazy strict about it, but that core value of not taking life is there.
Personally, I eat meat too, and I'm also not a huge fan of needlessly killing dogs, and I'm not even Buddhist! I feel like there's a middle ground where I can care about animals, respect life, and also have a cheeseburger. I'm certain some people will find that to be hypocritical, but it's really not a huge gotcha to me.
Buddhism in Bhutan is different. I think it's the state religion, has monarchy support, it's Vajrayana (very few countries have Vajrayana as their major Buddhism), and religion is less "background noise" in Bhutan than somewhere like Japan, a kind of Buddhist-Shinto mash-up dissolving into atheism.
I think Buddhism in Bhutan likely did influence this course of action.
Animal welfare is a thing in Buddhism though. India has animal welfare in their constitution. Buddhism is also the only religion that notes animal rights.
I think you can compare it with Christians, there are plenty of sinners.
If we believe that animals were created by someone for men, it would follow that men were also created for animals since some animals do eat human flesh.
The problem I see here is that dogs are not just "animals". They're artificial creations of humans, and an invasive species when they're not kept as pets inside homes. There's a good reason that, for instance, in the Australian outback they kill, on sight, and feral cat they find: they're invasive species that predate the local native animal species to extinction. Animals do not have a right to live when they don't belong in a particular ecosystem, especially when those animals aren't even natural to begin with.
If we were talking about a native species of bear, things would be entirely different.
