A case-study based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2016 in the region of Shimla and in 2018 in Delhi concerns a judgment ruled in 2014 by the High Court of Himachal Pradesh that banned all animal sacrifices in the state—an appeal is still pending before the Supreme Court of India. My aim is to go beyond the mere text of the judgment and to try to understand the various circumstances and interactions that led to this legal ruling. I shall therefore introduce the actors involved, their discourses and the way in which the case was brought to the court. I will rely on conversations that took place during my fieldwork as well as on different types of documents collected during my stay: court records, court decisions, newspaper articles. The case shows how the court’s handling involved a large number of actors and institutions: not only petitioners, judges or legal professionals but also various kinds of government officers, journalists, villagers, politicians, temple administrators as well as institutional mediums speaking on behalf of village gods. While this ‘democratization’ of the controversy was driven by the court, it was also rhetorically constructed by the judge in his attempt to boost the reform. Based on the court file and on ethnographic data, the contribution analyses how, beyond the official and ‘public’ aspects of the case which referred to legal, ritual, reformist and ecological arguments or to animal welfare, other framings of the story highlighted by protagonists outside the court emphasise various economic or political issues. In the conclusion, I situate the case within a broader legal perspective by contrasting this Indian High Court ruling with a case of animal sacrifice that was decided by the US Supreme Court in favour of Santeria, a minority religion in the state of Florida whose members claim that sacrifice is an essential part of their practice. The comparison will show how, while in the USA case the court decided against the ban on animal sacrifice in the name of religious freedom, in the Indian case the court ruled in favour of the ban and opposed the principle of religious reform and social progress to the idea of religious freedom.