Drupal - Disable taxonomy pages

If you don't need taxonomy you can always just disable the module.

If you still need the functionality but don't want the display pages to exist I guess you could implement hook_menu_alter() to remove them from the registry:

function MYMODULE_menu_alter(&$items) {
  unset($items['taxonomy/term/%taxonomy_term']);
  unset($items['taxonomy/term/%taxonomy_term/view']);
  unset($items['taxonomy/term/%taxonomy_term/feed']); // If you want to hide the feed as well.
}

I'd do some thorough testing after doing that though, I'm not sure if it would have any knock-on effects. Also if you're using the default taxonomy View for your taxonomy pages you'll obviously need to disable that as well.

This is an old question, but definitely worth adding another answer to due to Google pointing a lot of questions here.

I believe a great option for this issue would be Disable Term Node Listings module which allows you to 404 or 403 the taxonomy listing pages based on vocabulary.

EDIT

Updating my own answer here, the module above does not disable the /feed paths so is useless for those. I'll be utilising a hook_menu_alter to kill those.