Animal sacrifice is a real and regular part of Lucumi practice, most often chickens, pigeons or goats. The animal is killed by a designated priest under ritual rules, the blood is offered to the consecrated stones of the orisha, and except in certain cleansing rites the carcass is cooked and eaten by those present. Practitioners point out that this differs from commercial slaughter chiefly in being done attentively and with prayer.
The practice produced the most consequential court case involving any African diaspora religion. When a Lucumi congregation leased land in Hialeah, Florida in April 1987 and announced plans for an open church, the city council met in emergency session that June and went on to pass ordinances prohibiting the ritual killing of animals while leaving hunting, pest control, kosher slaughter and commercial slaughterhouses untouched. In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, decided on 11 June 1993, the Supreme Court struck the ordinances down. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Kennedy held that they were neither neutral nor generally applicable: they had been drafted to suppress one religion's central practice while exempting comparable secular conduct, and could not survive the strict scrutiny that follows. The decision remains a leading free exercise precedent far beyond the religion that brought it.
The name is contested as well. Santeria was applied from outside, with a sneer, to people thought excessively devoted to saints. It is now the most widely recognised term and many practitioners use it without objection, but others prefer Lucumi, from the term for the Yoruba-descended community in Cuba, or Regla de Ocha, the rule of the orisha, or simply Ocha. The preference tracks the wider argument about how much Catholic material belongs in the religion, and no neutral choice is available.