This topic touches a very soft spot in my heart as I’ve had to watch a cat die from being forced on a vegan diet. I’ve seen the results, and it is so very sad. Keep your goddamn morals out of other’s lives. Especially an animal that has no say in the matter. Fuck vegans.
Yeah I see no difference between militant pro-lifers and militant vegans. You don’t get a say in how I choose to interpret the information presented to me. But if you want to teach me things I didn’t know before or hadn’t considered I’m happy to listen. Just don’t tell me my choices are morally reprehensible when they’re my choices
It’s not just your choices alone, you’re ignoring something here: If the animal whose death you pay for every day could speak, it would object. If it could defend itself, it would fight against its death. It wants to go on living just like you. But you kill it anyway, against its will, because you can, because the animal is innocent and because you simply like it’s taste.
In addition to this violence, animal agriculture is also causing great damage to our planet, so your personal choice affects the lifes of other people, living and yet to be born as well. I can hardly think of any parallels to the pro-lifers.If the
animalfeotus whose death you pay for every day could speak, it would object. If it could defend itself, it would fight against its death. It wants to go on living just like you. But you kill it anyway, against its will, because you can, because theanimalfetus is innocentI can hardly think of any parallels to the pro-lifers.
Vegans argued that cats, which are obligate carnivores, can eat a vegan diet safely. Lemmy.world admin removed the posts for being misinformation, and the vegan community threw a fit over it.
I really hate how many people are spreading disinfo for no reason here. We should be better than that.
The vegans stated very clearly that current science shows that the cat would need a fuckton of supplements and attention to be on a vegan diet but it’s functional.
The admins then overstepped and removed such comments.
I’m not going to argue the validity of any of those claims as I’m not a vegan and I don’t care to research, but the vegan mods were a lot more reasonable than they’re being painted here.
The pet sector must die, pet ownership isn’t vegan, pet breeders are the enemies;
We’re not doing “optimal nutrition”, sorry. That biohacking shit to create immortal adopted pets isn’t going to work out. It’s hardly even clear for humans what the optimal diet is, and they pretend that they know what it is for cats??? These fools don’t even comprehend that evolution doesn’t give a shit about longevity. It’s a standard imposed by the marketing agencies of pet foods who want to milk pet owner feelings to have their pets die after they do. It’s a false standard that is great for advertising, but otherwise functions as a Nirvana fallacy machine.
This is just a rephrase, but pet ownership is bourgeois. Well, aristocratic, then bourgeois. Detach. This isn’t about you, you don’t get to annex a sentient being just to keep them as an emotional service slave or as a status symbol. This one is especially for Americans where pets live better than poor people.
Uh. Hardly reasonable.
Are you just posting a random comment to me or what? What relevance does this have to the admin retaliations?
That’s one of the Vegan mods on .world expressing their views on vegan diets for cats. That’s not “The vegans stated very clearly that current science shows that the cat would need a fuckton of supplements and attention to be on a vegan diet but it’s functional.”, that’s outright “Science doesn’t know shit” lunacy.
That’s not the comment which caused this whole issue. It seems to me you’re cherry picking out of context
Alright, since “Things the mods have said” isn’t acceptable evidence for whether or not the mods are pushing ridiculous views on vegan diets for cats, and not just “The vegans stated very clearly that current science shows that the cat would need a fuckton of supplements and attention to be on a vegan diet but it’s functional”, I suppose them saying the ASPCA doesn’t know what they’re talking about, while THEIR simple ‘common sense’ allows them to understand a cat’s TRUE dietary needs is also kosher?
This whole thing comes down to aggressively anti-scientific mods pushing misinformation and removing information to the contrary and getting removed by an admin for their troubles. Or was removing the link to the ASPCA for being ‘misinformation’ also a sign of how reasonable the c/Vegan mods were?
I don’t give a single solitary fuck what happens to Rooki. Whether they were too quick to remove or too uncivil or what. But defending misinformation, or defending mods pushing misinformation as just being reasonable? That gets my dander up.
The commentary you’re pointing is way more reasonable than you make it sound. I implore people to read the context themselves and not to trust summaries with rage bait agendas here.
Stop doing the reddit thing. Making people angry at people more radical than them isn’t helping.
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.
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.
Cats are obligate carnivores, sparky. That means they can’t be vegan.
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. 🤔
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s a good way to shorten the cats life and make it suffer terribly.
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/
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.
shrug
Looks like they solved this problem 20 years ago.
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.
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?
This post is honestly an excuse for anti-vegan bashing. Even if some vegan mods have bad takes for cat nutrition it shouldn’t excuse the hate circle jerk on display here .
Remember to always be sceptical towards presentations that try to make you angry like this.
This post is honestly an excuse for anti-vegan bashing. Even if some vegan mods have bad takes for cat nutrition it shouldn’t excuse the hate circle jerk on display here .
As anyone reading the comment section would see, there’s far from a ‘hate circle jerk’ on display here.
Remember to always be sceptical towards presentations that try to make you angry like this.
And remember to always be skeptical towards presentations that insinuate that justified anger towards harmful conduct is an overreaction, and you really just need to chill and sit back and let it happen.
Perhaps one should also be skeptical towards presentations that attempt to dismiss criticism as ‘bashing’ and irrational regardless of the context or actual content of the criticisms.
Anger shuts down critical thinking. This is why all reactionary content tries to make us angry (or scared).
I never said to just “chill and sit back and let it happen.” nor did I say not to criticize. But what you’re doing is ragebaiting which is harmful
