That the notion of animal sacrifice outside of a culinary context appears neither dominant nor persistent.
Being kosher or halal with a tiger or bear has apparent added work, health and safety issues.
It sounds more like you're thinking of a modernist stereotype of primitivsm akin to the American Christianist panic about Satanism thirty-some years ago.
Meanwhile,
Jeeves↑ did answer you:
Because these are of value to their owners. Hence the concept of 'sacrifice'.
The response, of course—
And bears and tiger's aren't valuable?
—was disappointing. If you cannot figure out that predators hunted and killed are not as much a sacrifice as
food, then it is hard to figure what to tell you.
To the other—
Do they still do this, or is it a bygone tradition?
—go ask a rabbi about cheese.
No, seriously; if you're not a Jew, it's really, really complicated, so go ahead and look it up yourself instead of asking people you don't respect to figure it out for you.
But, to the beeblebrox—
It's more about regulating bad habits. People will eat meat regardless, so overlaying it with rituals regulates it. Take away the ritual and it just becomes a user demand market that gets out of control.
—you really don't seem to have a clue what you're on about.
Eating meat as a
bad habit is a notion of later vintage. And this
is an interesting thing that arises among moral vegetarianism, though I admit I haven't encountered this clumsy a version of it for over a decade, but still, moral vegetarianism is a really messed up joke: Consumption of meat has not selected out of the species; trying to will selection, as such, is dumb enough as it goes, but it really is for nothing better than personal aesthetics, as problematic as it is megalomaniacal.
Try it this way:
You answered↑ a
ten month-old post↑, and instead of just running with the most obvious examples of ritual human sacrifice in history, you chose instead the
ahistorical moral vegetarian rant↑ requiring, say, the Jebusites or Quraysh to be twenty-first century cosmopolitans. Bacon cheeseburger? Tattoo? Anal sex? Go live in the desert for forty years, with thousands of other people, and tell me about sanitation; maybe stuffing a sheep bladder with cow stomach, chicken parts, and ground up pig gland isn't the best idea while you're out there. There is a thesis, for instance, about British accents, and hog wallow parasite worms, and now you know where the U.S. "Southern" accent comes from, or some such; regulating livestock handling isn't about a "bad habit" of meat consumption, it's about not wrecking a society with disease.
Meanwhile, in an Abramic world, if God hadn't meant for people to eat meat, we would not eat meat. In a more evolutionary world, well, the human impulse to pursue particular proteins most abundantly found in other animals has not selected out.
There
is a personal joke in it all, because, as a statistical matter, this version of moral vegetarianism is one I typically hear overlapping a range of atheistic sociopolitical outlooks. I'm more accustomed to anti-atheistic considerations of dietary law and food custom having a clue about the dietary laws and food customs, since those under discussion are, generally speaking, theistic. That is to say: (1) The last time I encountered a comparably clumsy moral vegetarianism, it happened to be an atheist who was saying it; (2) if he was to parody a theist making fun of atheists, he would actually sound kind of like you, which is mere coincidence, or else some arcane thesis I cannot presently construct or discern, about the boundaries and nature of some abstract data set.
