Dead Realm is a creepy multiplayer action game with immersive and horrifyingly beautiful environments. “As for a full-out nomad being a vegetarian, I don’t have any records of anyone doing that.Ghosts prey on the living inside the haunted grounds of a long dead electricity tycoon. “You can imagine how hard it would be as a nomad to be a vegetarian,” he says. Traditionally, vegetarianism was widely practised in monasteries, but not among nomads, says Geoffrey Barstow, an expert on Tibetan Buddhism at Oregon State University, who said some nomads see the “no slaughter” movement as a threat to the practicalities of making enough money to survive. On the other hand, the clergy’s strategy, which requests nomads to follow the Tibetan religious way of life they advocate for, but that does not conform to their daily habits as lay and nomad Buddhists,” she says. “On the one hand, the Chinese state’s path of assimilation, which is depriving them of their specific culture, language and way of life. Now, many monasteries don’t give any more meat, but some allow to eat meat outside,” says Buffetrille, adding that nomads are caught between two alternatives.
The spiritual oasis was home to an estimated 40,000 unofficial residents – monks and spirituality seekers – before the extensive destruction of the area and expulsion of a large number of monks since 2016. The anti-slaughter movement first emerged around 2000 from the Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, famous from photos of its red-roofed shacks dotting a treeless alpine valley in the Garzê region of Sichuan. The sentencing last June of 10 Tibetans, including two monks, to jail terms of between eight to 13 years and fines of up to £7,000 each for trying to block the construction of a commercial slaughterhouse in Sangchu, Gansu province, has largely silenced discussion coming out of Tibetan areas about anti-slaughter beliefs. The anti-slaughter movement is declining due to increased surveillance and repression that criminalises Tibetan identity Katia Buffetrille, anthropologist “My impression is that the movement is declining as a result of increased surveillance and repression that criminalises any movement asserting Tibetan identity,” says Katia Buffetrille, a French anthropologist and Tibetologist who has been travelling to Tibetan areas for more than three decades. Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via GettyĬhinese authorities appear to be winning this battle, at least in the physical realm. In recent years China has sought to expand commercial production of the meat. The production drive has included the expansion of large numbers of commercial slaughterhouses to process the meat from the approximately 14 million yaks on the Tibetan plateau.Ī butcher sells Yak meat at a market in Beijing. That “anti-slaughter movement” has put them at odds with local authorities intent on driving development and the industrial production of yak meat for a Chinese public that is consuming more meat than ever before. In addition to the milk, butter and cheese they derived from yaks, meat was a necessity in their harsh lives.īut a movement spurred by Tibetan Buddhist monks in the region over the past two decades has increasingly urged now sedentary nomads to practise vegetarianism, to pay a “life ransom” for the release of animals destined for the slaughterhouse, and to abandon the slaughter of their own animals because they have settled down.
These yak-tending herders have always eaten meat. F ormer free-roaming nomads now mostly resettled in rows of sun-baked block houses in Tibet are facing a struggle for their identity, their spiritual and cultural practices – and even their stomachs.