In Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' there are key aspects of the plot of the novel that are completely excluded from Blade Runner, including:
That animals have almost died out, and people keep one or more animals as pets, including farm animals. This feeds into the elements of empathy and the Voigt Kampff test.
That many people in the world follow a technological religion - Mercerism - where people commune with an enigmatic figure through a virtual reality device called an 'empathy box'.
That a shadow Police force exists in L.A. almost entirely staffed by replicants, and that they use an entirely different test for human/android. A blade runner from that outfit directly wonders which one of them (Deckard or himself) are real.
In the novel, LA and indeed most of the planet is now vastly underpopulated, which is another reason why people use empathy boxes and pets to make themselves feel part of a community. This is hinted in the movie in the scenes where J.F.Sebastian lives in a deserted condo, but many of the street scenes and bars are very crowded.
Why did the writers and Ridley Scott exclude these aspects of the original source material, despite them being core to the plot of the novel.
Answer
Lots of reasons:
Books and movies are different art forms - direct and strict conversions from one form to the other rarely work (unless they have large fan bases, such as LoTR, Harry Potter, etc).
The movie was written and re-written several times by several screen-writers. You can imagine they all brought their own visions and ideas to the screenplay.
Direction - Ridley Scott also brought his own vision to the project, plus if you read about the production you will see it was full of conflict between him, the producers, the financiers, the designers and the shooting crew.
Budget - again, many choices of shot and setting were due to limited budget. They had a tiny studio based set, which forced him to shoot at night, use lots of smoke and rain, close shots of crowded streets to hide the fact they were reusing the same area continually.
There are a couple of mentions about how rare animals are - the artificial snake - "you think I'd be working here if I could afford a real snake?" and the owl at the beginning. Again, it would be hard to make this a real theme of the movie, and lets face it, it's a bit all over the place in terms of plot and theme (heresy alert).
Avoiding religion in what was supposed to be a mass market movie was probably an easy decision...
While none of these things demanded the themes you mention being dropped, you can see the environment in which the film was created made it likely significant divergences from the source material likely.
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