There was a post about making cats vegan. The mod then decided that people posting information on why that is a bad idea were antivegan or something. The mod started then removing any information that pointed to cats not being able to be health while on a vegan diet. The Lemmy.world admins them stepped in stating that improperly feeding your cat constitutes animal abuse and is unethical. This made many die hard vegans very mad.
For the record, cats can not be vegan. They can survive on it but they will have shorter more painful lives and they will go blind. There bodies start breaking down without the proteins and amino acids found in meat. I understand why vegans would be unhappy with that answer but it is the way it is.
Interesting enough, that’s not the case for dog. You can put a dog on a vegan diet as long as you are very careful and are constantly monitoring. It isn’t for the faint of heart and can have very sad outcomes. It isn’t something you can arbitrarily do.
I am a vegan. While my dogs were alive they ate meat as well as veggies. It seems to me that a lot of vegans don’t realise that it’s a scale and not binary. The whole philosophy of veganism is “as much as you are able” so I guess there is extremism everywhere.
It’s bizarre to me that harcore vegans want to own a pet to begin with. Keeping bees for honey is bad, but separating a kitten from its mother at an early age and castrating it for your convenience and deciding how they live (restricted to an apartment or not) is totally fine?
I understand that most pets live a good life, but man, I can’t bring myself to make choices like these. I mean there are ways to circumvent it (get an older cat from an asylum for example) but it doesn’t really remove the “pet dilemma” to me.
Most people I know adopt from rescue shelters and all the vegans I know do that, often even focusing on pets that are somewhat “disadvantaged” regarding getting adopted, i.e. disabled or chronically ill animals. They go to an animal shelter not primarily with the wish of having a pet but providing a better life for an animal (because let’s face it, even the best-intentioned shelters are understaffed and underfunded).
I knew a hardcore vegan girl like a decade ago when it was rather rare to see someone to that extreme, or at least to me. She said she feeds her cat only vegan food, and i was pretty sure that that’s not a thing, but i didn’t really know. Her roommate then told me that she goes through quite a lot of cats, because they either die or run away.
Imagine you wanted children and then someone would come along and castrate you because there’s a problem with overpopulation. You take away an individaul’s choice of reproduction for the greater good. And it makes sense, but the lack of consent or even understandment does not sit well with me.
Putting down pets is another thing. You make the decision whether a (sick/suffering) animal is going to die, while we are refusing to allow people to make this decision for themselves in most countries.
I absolutely see your point and I would not say you are wrong about it. But to me these are ethical questions that I just don’t wish to answer because there is not really a right answer.
Imagine you wanted children and then someone would come along and castrate you because there’s a problem with overpopulation. You take away an individaul’s choice of reproduction for the greater good. And it makes sense, but the lack of consent or even understandment does not sit well with me.
You’re anthropomorphizing animals too much. Cats don’t “want” children. Beyond a basic biological need they don’t give a shit about procreation. It’s not even a difficult question, ethically speaking. In almost every environment they exist in cats are considered invasive, reproduce like crazy, and tend to be incredibly destructive to local species. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with owning a cat, but it’s important to do so responsibly.
I’m vegan and I don’t know why these “vegans” are towing the line to to include non-human species. It’s just as gross for vegan humans to apply their values to values in a dominant manner as it is for non-vegans to. Literally vegans doing this is antithesis to the entire cause.
I’m glad they got slapped. You’ll always have idiots in a movement I guess…
What I don’t understand about all of this is the consent aspect: your cat/dog/pet did not consent to a vegan diet, so why are you forcing it on them? Obviously you can’t ask your pet what they want for dinner, but left to their own devices, I doubt any of them would choose a vegan diet, so… Why force it on them?
Even ignoring all of the science and everything, morally/ethically, it just feels messed up to me. It’d be like forcing your child to eat food they’re allergic to because it’s healthier/more ethical, despite it causing health issues for them.
I don’t have a dog in this race, but it seems to me the obvious answer to your consent dilemma is “no animal consents to being eaten.” I feed my cat a non-vegan diet, for the record. I’m just not pretending that the fish likes it or anything. If a perfectly healthy vegan diet is possible for a cat, which I’m honestly not clear on, then it’s definitely ethical to do so.
If you extrapolated the moral dilemma to the extreme, it would be like saying “it’s unethical to take the knife away from that serial murderer. He just wants to murder and he didn’t consent to stopping!” Obviously, that’s a ridiculous comparison, but so is making the consent argument. My point isn’t that feeding cats meat is wrong (again, I feed my cat meat), it’s that making a consent argument against veganism is silly.
True, no animal consents to being eaten, and I understand veganism is meant to eliminate or mitigate unnecessary animal products from one’s diet, but I don’t think “no animal consents to being eaten” works here. That’s nature (and yes, I’m ignoring that humans are part of nature, despite our best efforts to think we aren’t), you can’t change nature. You’re not going to get a lion or a shark to stop being a carnivorous predator because that’s just what they are.
I also don’t necessarily agree with your knife argument: a serial killer does not need to kill to survive, whereas living things need to eat to survive. I don’t think the consent argument is as ridiculous as that, I would more equate it to an infirm cancer patient being given chemotherapy drugs versus homeopathy treatment. They can’t consent to either, but one is clearly meant to try to fix the issue, whereas the other is a personal choice.
Veganism is a personal choice, cats needing meat in their diet is not. I have nothing against veganism, and I appreciate your arguments (I hadn’t considered the “not consenting to be eaten” aspect). Idk, to me, people who force their diets/lifestyles onto their pets that aren’t equipped for it, it’s just… Immoral? I’m blanking on the word, it’s been a long week.
I understand why vegans would be unhappy with that answer but it is the way it is.
I don’t. Veganism is about the fact that humans can live without animal products, which is true. Not accepting that actual carnivores exist, even being unhappy with this means you’re well in extremist nutjob territory.
For the record, science disagrees with you. According to an analysis of all current research, there is no statistically significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet. Of there is a similarly high quality study that finds that a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet is worse for cats I would love to see it.
The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.
People often use the obligate carnivore excuse, but use it in an unscientific way. Obligate carnivores have nutritional needs that can only be meet through meat in the wild, but humans are perfectly capable of manufacturing these nutrients. We are so good at it that we supplement these synthetic nutrients in meat based cat food already.
This is a contentious issue for most people, and it can be hard when you are very passionate about something to look at the evidence and change your opinion. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.
Intresting paper. It is not the conclusive evidence that you think it is. It’s ok, reading science is hard.
Paper concluded that the vegan diet did not seem to have adverse effects, but they had a very small sample size and the expiriment went on for a very short duration.
And then they site scientific papers that disagree with their findings. So there definitely is science out there that disagrees with the vegan diet being ok.
The mod then decided that people posting information on why that is a bad idea were antivegan or something. The mod started then removing any information that pointed to cats not being able to be health while on a vegan diet.
Pets eat pre-processed food, and we’ve had vegetarian protein supplements for a while. How does this work for cats? Idk, ask a vet. But these foods have been around for a while and I’m not hearing about a mass die-off of indoor cats as a result, so I’m willing to give vegan cat owners the benefit of the doubt.
For the record, cats can not be vegan. They can survive on it but they will have shorter more painful lives and they will go blind.
The expected lifespan of feral cats in the wild runs around 2-5 years. House cats routinely live into their teenage years and can hit north of 20. The ideal lifestyle for a cat is indoors, regardless of the precise composition of their diets.
That’s a good way to shorten the cats life and make it suffer terribly. Your car will go a while without an oil change but it will eventually quit on you
Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat.
…
Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.
Disclaimer that I’m not even a vegan but you’re spreading disinfo here to make vegans seem completely unreasonable. I suggest anyone check out the actual discussions instead of trusting this summary.
I’m not a expert so you should read up on it. The problem is that the vegan community was only allowing random studies saying how cats were healthier on a vegan diet. None of those papers were peer reviewed or all that credible. On the other side there is tons of research and articles written by actual experts that say it is a bad idea. I looked it up before making this comment.
Ye I don’t particularly agree that one should try to make vegetarian cats myself either and I also think it’s not coop to simply delete opposing research which doesn’t mean match one’s worldview (so long as the research is not flawed). But I also understand and can painfully see how embattled vegan ideas and spaces are which explains them being extra defensive
Cats are obligate carnivores in the wild. This just means they have dietary needs that would normally require meat. But we can make vegan, synthetic food that meets these needs. In fact, studies have shown that cats on vegan diets tend to be healthier if anything.
Show me a scientific study that proves this. If you can say it with confidence, it should be no trouble at all for you to prove it. I, on the other hand, am lazy and don’t care all that much, so I want the people confidently stating opinions to share their research to save me effort.
Those aren’t scientific studies. The vegans have scientific studies. You expect me to believe you know better than them, but you can’t show me sources of equal quality?
Cat food is food specifically formulated and designed for consumption by cats. As obligate carnivores, cats have specific requirements for their dietary nutrients, namely nutrients found only in meat or synthesised, such as taurine and Vitamin A.
Hey look, your Wikipedia link says the nutrients cats need from meat can be synthesised in literally the second sentence.
Vegetarian or vegan cat food has been available for many years, and is targeted primarily at vegan and vegetarian pet owners. While a small percentage of owners choose such a diet based on its perceived health benefits, the majority do so due to ethical concerns, such as about the large environmental impacts of animal agriculture.
You also put have the thing where it says they are obligate carnivores in the second sentence of the first paragraph that is cited. I did NOT make those claims just provided you with links for further reading.
There was a post about making cats vegan. The mod then decided that people posting information on why that is a bad idea were antivegan or something. The mod started then removing any information that pointed to cats not being able to be health while on a vegan diet. The Lemmy.world admins them stepped in stating that improperly feeding your cat constitutes animal abuse and is unethical. This made many die hard vegans very mad.
For the record, cats can not be vegan. They can survive on it but they will have shorter more painful lives and they will go blind. There bodies start breaking down without the proteins and amino acids found in meat. I understand why vegans would be unhappy with that answer but it is the way it is.
Interesting enough, that’s not the case for dog. You can put a dog on a vegan diet as long as you are very careful and are constantly monitoring. It isn’t for the faint of heart and can have very sad outcomes. It isn’t something you can arbitrarily do.
I am a vegan. While my dogs were alive they ate meat as well as veggies. It seems to me that a lot of vegans don’t realise that it’s a scale and not binary. The whole philosophy of veganism is “as much as you are able” so I guess there is extremism everywhere.
It’s bizarre to me that harcore vegans want to own a pet to begin with. Keeping bees for honey is bad, but separating a kitten from its mother at an early age and castrating it for your convenience and deciding how they live (restricted to an apartment or not) is totally fine?
I understand that most pets live a good life, but man, I can’t bring myself to make choices like these. I mean there are ways to circumvent it (get an older cat from an asylum for example) but it doesn’t really remove the “pet dilemma” to me.
Most people I know adopt from rescue shelters and all the vegans I know do that, often even focusing on pets that are somewhat “disadvantaged” regarding getting adopted, i.e. disabled or chronically ill animals. They go to an animal shelter not primarily with the wish of having a pet but providing a better life for an animal (because let’s face it, even the best-intentioned shelters are understaffed and underfunded).
I knew a hardcore vegan girl like a decade ago when it was rather rare to see someone to that extreme, or at least to me. She said she feeds her cat only vegan food, and i was pretty sure that that’s not a thing, but i didn’t really know. Her roommate then told me that she goes through quite a lot of cats, because they either die or run away.
am not vegan but I’ll point out:
giving a cat a home, and fixing it so it won’t breed further rescue cats, is not a dilemma to me.
Imagine you wanted children and then someone would come along and castrate you because there’s a problem with overpopulation. You take away an individaul’s choice of reproduction for the greater good. And it makes sense, but the lack of consent or even understandment does not sit well with me.
Putting down pets is another thing. You make the decision whether a (sick/suffering) animal is going to die, while we are refusing to allow people to make this decision for themselves in most countries.
I absolutely see your point and I would not say you are wrong about it. But to me these are ethical questions that I just don’t wish to answer because there is not really a right answer.
Your second paragraph is an indictment on how we treat humans not how we treat our pets.
You’re anthropomorphizing animals too much. Cats don’t “want” children. Beyond a basic biological need they don’t give a shit about procreation. It’s not even a difficult question, ethically speaking. In almost every environment they exist in cats are considered invasive, reproduce like crazy, and tend to be incredibly destructive to local species. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with owning a cat, but it’s important to do so responsibly.
I’m vegan and I don’t know why these “vegans” are towing the line to to include non-human species. It’s just as gross for vegan humans to apply their values to values in a dominant manner as it is for non-vegans to. Literally vegans doing this is antithesis to the entire cause.
I’m glad they got slapped. You’ll always have idiots in a movement I guess…
What I don’t understand about all of this is the consent aspect: your cat/dog/pet did not consent to a vegan diet, so why are you forcing it on them? Obviously you can’t ask your pet what they want for dinner, but left to their own devices, I doubt any of them would choose a vegan diet, so… Why force it on them?
Even ignoring all of the science and everything, morally/ethically, it just feels messed up to me. It’d be like forcing your child to eat food they’re allergic to because it’s healthier/more ethical, despite it causing health issues for them.
Absolutely wild
I don’t have a dog in this race, but it seems to me the obvious answer to your consent dilemma is “no animal consents to being eaten.” I feed my cat a non-vegan diet, for the record. I’m just not pretending that the fish likes it or anything. If a perfectly healthy vegan diet is possible for a cat, which I’m honestly not clear on, then it’s definitely ethical to do so.
If you extrapolated the moral dilemma to the extreme, it would be like saying “it’s unethical to take the knife away from that serial murderer. He just wants to murder and he didn’t consent to stopping!” Obviously, that’s a ridiculous comparison, but so is making the consent argument. My point isn’t that feeding cats meat is wrong (again, I feed my cat meat), it’s that making a consent argument against veganism is silly.
True, no animal consents to being eaten, and I understand veganism is meant to eliminate or mitigate unnecessary animal products from one’s diet, but I don’t think “no animal consents to being eaten” works here. That’s nature (and yes, I’m ignoring that humans are part of nature, despite our best efforts to think we aren’t), you can’t change nature. You’re not going to get a lion or a shark to stop being a carnivorous predator because that’s just what they are.
I also don’t necessarily agree with your knife argument: a serial killer does not need to kill to survive, whereas living things need to eat to survive. I don’t think the consent argument is as ridiculous as that, I would more equate it to an infirm cancer patient being given chemotherapy drugs versus homeopathy treatment. They can’t consent to either, but one is clearly meant to try to fix the issue, whereas the other is a personal choice.
Veganism is a personal choice, cats needing meat in their diet is not. I have nothing against veganism, and I appreciate your arguments (I hadn’t considered the “not consenting to be eaten” aspect). Idk, to me, people who force their diets/lifestyles onto their pets that aren’t equipped for it, it’s just… Immoral? I’m blanking on the word, it’s been a long week.
animals don’t consent to anything, any more than trees or machines. it is absurd to discuss consent from something that can not be informed.
I don’t. Veganism is about the fact that humans can live without animal products, which is true. Not accepting that actual carnivores exist, even being unhappy with this means you’re well in extremist nutjob territory.
For the record, science disagrees with you. According to an analysis of all current research, there is no statistically significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet. Of there is a similarly high quality study that finds that a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet is worse for cats I would love to see it.
The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.
People often use the obligate carnivore excuse, but use it in an unscientific way. Obligate carnivores have nutritional needs that can only be meet through meat in the wild, but humans are perfectly capable of manufacturing these nutrients. We are so good at it that we supplement these synthetic nutrients in meat based cat food already.
This is a contentious issue for most people, and it can be hard when you are very passionate about something to look at the evidence and change your opinion. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.
Intresting paper. It is not the conclusive evidence that you think it is. It’s ok, reading science is hard.
Paper concluded that the vegan diet did not seem to have adverse effects, but they had a very small sample size and the expiriment went on for a very short duration.
And then they site scientific papers that disagree with their findings. So there definitely is science out there that disagrees with the vegan diet being ok.
a bit less aggressive please and then this comment is almost perfect
Nah I matched the tone of who I was responding to.
true true, but:
An eye for an eye…
If you don’t want a toxic internet, it’s on us to start it
You are a danger to animals. Stop believing what you want to believe and look at the research
I’m happy to do research. Care to post some academic literature on the subject?
Pets eat pre-processed food, and we’ve had vegetarian protein supplements for a while. How does this work for cats? Idk, ask a vet. But these foods have been around for a while and I’m not hearing about a mass die-off of indoor cats as a result, so I’m willing to give vegan cat owners the benefit of the doubt.
The expected lifespan of feral cats in the wild runs around 2-5 years. House cats routinely live into their teenage years and can hit north of 20. The ideal lifestyle for a cat is indoors, regardless of the precise composition of their diets.
I think the bug take away is to talk to and listen to a expert. Especially don’t start making huge changes to your cats diet
Vegan owners get new cats all the time. I don’t think it’s a question of changing the diet, but starting them on it.
That’s a good way to shorten the cats life and make it suffer terribly. Your car will go a while without an oil change but it will eventually quit on you
You’ve prevented no evidence to support the claim that protein enrichment in cat food will hurt your cat.
https://www.aspca.org/news/why-cant-my-cat-be-vegan
Also there are people with horror stories as well
https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/
…
shrug
Looks like they solved this problem 20 years ago.
Disclaimer that I’m not even a vegan but you’re spreading disinfo here to make vegans seem completely unreasonable. I suggest anyone check out the actual discussions instead of trusting this summary.
I agree.
I’m not a expert so you should read up on it. The problem is that the vegan community was only allowing random studies saying how cats were healthier on a vegan diet. None of those papers were peer reviewed or all that credible. On the other side there is tons of research and articles written by actual experts that say it is a bad idea. I looked it up before making this comment.
Ye I don’t particularly agree that one should try to make vegetarian cats myself either and I also think it’s not coop to simply delete opposing research which doesn’t mean match one’s worldview (so long as the research is not flawed). But I also understand and can painfully see how embattled vegan ideas and spaces are which explains them being extra defensive
Cats are obligate carnivores, sparky. That means they can’t be vegan.
Cats are obligate carnivores in the wild. This just means they have dietary needs that would normally require meat. But we can make vegan, synthetic food that meets these needs. In fact, studies have shown that cats on vegan diets tend to be healthier if anything.
I don’t know enough about that topic to argue for or against which is not what I’m trying to argue
You don’t know enough about the topic to argue but claim someone else is spreading misinformation.
Well if you don’t know the topic but are making claims like this then it seems like you may be the one spreading misinformation.
Show me a scientific study that proves this. If you can say it with confidence, it should be no trouble at all for you to prove it. I, on the other hand, am lazy and don’t care all that much, so I want the people confidently stating opinions to share their research to save me effort.
A quick search reveals quite a few sources and articles to read. I hope this helps. Not an exhaustive list.
Those aren’t scientific studies. The vegans have scientific studies. You expect me to believe you know better than them, but you can’t show me sources of equal quality?
One of those is a Wikipedia link which gives you primary sources. 🤔
Hey look, your Wikipedia link says the nutrients cats need from meat can be synthesised in literally the second sentence.
You also put have the thing where it says they are obligate carnivores in the second sentence of the first paragraph that is cited. I did NOT make those claims just provided you with links for further reading.
Edit: spelling and grammar