LONDON — Police seized a sacred bull from a Hindu monastery in Wales yesterday, cutting locked gates and dragging away protesters before taking the animal for slaughter because it had tested positive for tuberculosis.

The plight of Shambo the bull attracted worldwide attention after the diagnosis this spring and prompted the Skanda Vale monastery to create an petition campaign to try to save him. Hindus revere cattle and say killing the bull violates their religious rights. “They have broken into the temple and they’re taking him away for slaughter,” a Hindu Council spokesman, Sanjay Mistry, said. One of Shambo’s caretakers, Swami Suryananda, said officials “committed the most violent and ignorant act of desecration of our temple and destroyed an innocent life.”

“The perpetrators of this act will suffer the consequences of their actions for generations to come,” he said.

Welsh authorities refused to say when, where, or how Shambo would be killed. Regulations stipulate that cattle suspected of carrying bovine tuberculosis be slaughtered as the disease can spread to other cattle, to deer, and in rare cases to humans.

Authorities said no one was hurt and no arrests were made. “It’s bad, but I don’t blame the police because they were friendly and they did their duty,” one protester, Verena Blum, said.

A Webcam site, dubbed Moo Tube, which the monastery set up to show the flower-garlanded bull in his paddock, later broadcast images of an empty hay-lined shrine. Hindus saw the controversy as a religious freedom issue and took the government to court to prevent Shambo’s slaughter.