In Voodoo, food is one of the many offerings ceremoniously given to the Lwa (Spirits) and is usually shared afterward as a communal meal. In a meat-eating society, animals are food. In small-scale cultures, people slaughter animals at home rather than buying meat at the grocery store. Animal sacrifice is not about a morbid fascination with death of an animal; it is the offering of life-giving energy in the preparation of sacred food.

Here in the USA, most of us are ambivalent about animals. In our minds, the act of killing an animal is morally charged, but the act of eating one is morally neutral. The absence of death in our lives makes death compelling and mysterious. But in other cultures and in our rural areas, it is an unremarkable aspect of existence; slaughtering an animal is as neutral and necessary as putting a can of soup in a grocery cart.

Some Voodooists in the U.S., including my community in New Orleans, don’t consider animal sacrifice culturally appropriate and do not practice it, preferring to offer store-bought food to Lwa and community. (For the record, I am vegetarian.) My mentor and friend Sallie Ann Glassman once suggested that if someone wishes to perform animal sacrifice, they should slaughter and butcher their own food for a year before considering offering it in ceremony. But to other Voodoo communities, animal sacrifice is natural and integral to their tradition. They take animal life with reverence, cook the meat and eat it.

As long as hunting and the slaughter of animals for meat is accepted in our country, less familiar cultural practices that take animal life must also be respected.