If you want people to keep an old way of life and still make a living from it, you have to develop new products and markets for what it produces. A declining role, like animals used for transport once fuel is cheap, can be replaced by another one, like dairy, that still has room to grow.
A traditional product can stand out by how it is produced rather than what it is. Milk from animals kept humanely, in herds that roam freely and graze a wide variety of wild plants, carries a value that factory dairy cannot copy.
A herding community that refuses to sell its animals' milk or eat their meat keeps its bond with them sacred, but earns too little from them to keep them. When hard times come, the taboo itself gets broken: herders switch to other animals, or quietly sell breeding females for slaughter.
Herders who own no land feed their animals on fallow fields, village commons and forests. When those shared spaces shrink and officials place little value on herding, the animals decline, and with them the people's livelihood.
The close relationship between a people and their animals, raised almost like family members and feared by no one, is a human heritage worth conserving in its own right. The animal gives food and wealth, but just as importantly companionship, and losing the bond loses all three.