The English Psychiatrist Donald Woods Winnicott wrote: "I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt."

I understand that Lord Buddha taught the importance of the virtues of wisdom, kindness, patience, generosity and compassion. One of the moral precepts prohibits the killing of living things.

This could be said to be a conflicting message. On the one hand, one of the moral precepts in Buddhism prohibits killing living things.

On the other hand, some Buddhists are strictly vegetarian or vegan, and others eat meat. The latter justify their belief in carnism, saying they personally did not kill any living creature!

Dr Will Green wrote a paper based on the question - Why are so few spiritual teachers vegan?

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/why-are-few-spiritual-teachers-vegan/

I do wish to acknowledge that there are many brilliant, highly intelligent teachers available today who have developed a high degree of empathic emotional intelligence and who would agree naturally, using their own sentiments, that there is no full stop regarding spiritual enlightenment, that it is simply a stage on the path, a continual awakening out of concepts, and as such requires ongoing inner and outer work, aiming at becoming aware of any unawareness, and who fully support the practice of compassionate veganism.

Finally:

Dr. Peter Masefield - a Buddhist scholar and Pali translator - wrote the book 'Divine Revelation' in Pali Buddhism, and I appreciate reading his radical approach to the teachings of the Buddha. It offers a profound reformation of Buddhism as it is traditionally understood here in the West. He is quoted as saying that there is an often-misquoted Sutta, the Kalama Sutta, and this Sutta leads people to believe that the Buddha said not to adopt anything others say, but only to accept things that accord with their own experience. This is now misused by modern Buddhists, who take it as a license to chop, change and cut out whichever part of Buddhism they don’t like. If you are a Buddhist, I presume that to mean you believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha, and if that is so, then you can’t just throw various aspects of his teaching out of the window.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/found-translation/

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