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.
Most dietary sources of taurine are meat. This is why dogs and humans “can be vegan” but cats “can’t”. However, vegan taurine is made and can be bought as a supplement, both for humans (if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet), but also in properly made vegan cat food.
It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild (where the only source of taurine is meat) and you can’t just start to feed them a vegan diet without taurine and expect the cat to be healthy and survive.
In fact, cats fed a proper vegan diet tend to have better health:
I think the question is really what you are feeding your “vegan” cat: if you have managed to find (or make) a properly fortified vegan cat food it is theoretically possible to feed your cat a vegan diet.
This all feels a bit like the “controversy” around feeding young children and babies a vegan diet: done poorly it can be catastrophic (pun not intended), but it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet when enough effort is put into ensuring nutritional needs are actually satisfied.
That said, I also know of two other vegan responses:
for some vegans, having pets is not vegan to begin with, so a “vegan cat” is a contradiction in terms even if you fed them a vegan diet, you still wouldn’t be an ethical vegan by owning a cat. This is admittedly a less commonly held view which centers ethical veganism on the rights of animals to have autonomy, which if plausible in some ways seems at least impractical in the case of domesticated animals. There are questions of the harm that might be caused by choosing to treat cats not as pets but as autonomy-rights-bearing “wild” animals, but those ethical vegans might rightly point out this doesn’t undo the cat’s rights and the practical questions should be handled separately.
most vegans I know IRL just feed cats a non-vegan diet, acknowledging it is safer and more reasonable for their cat than trying to figure out a way to feed them a vegan diet. Good vegan cat food isn’t that common or easy to find as far as I know, and I assume it would be outrageously expensive.
Cats have dietary needs that would require them to eat meat in nature. 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 understand why people upvote summaries that don’t even try to be objective. I honestly think the mods there do notably abuse their power to remove comments, but let people decide that for themselves. This commenter is telling you who to support while being confidently incorrect on the original issue.
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.
A vet friend in a very trendy city encounters a lot of cats with significant health problems that stem from their owner’s attempt at a vegan diet, so whether or not it’s possible, too many people harm the health of their pets through attempting a vegan diet for it to be a safe thing to recommend trying
Yea that’s the thing.
I’m sure a team of scientists could eventually design an ethically sourced vegan cat food with synthetic versions of whatever is missing that could work fine for some cats.
The odds of a random lemming doing it right after reading one comment about it online is next to none.
Discussing it is one thing, recommending it and deleting anything that simply advises caution is weird.
First of all, that analysis you posted is not particularly scientific, and there’s an abundance of evidence that vegan diets hurt cats.
Second, once you’re getting into arguments about “synthetic nutrients”, it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know how animals nutrition works, and probably shouldn’t have a pet at all if you don’t know how to keep one without making it suffer due to malnutrition.
Not sure why you’re vegan, but it certainly isn’t because you care about the well-being of animals…
Vegans be reposting this link everywhere not realizing how silly it makes them look. First, one of its big points is that there hasn’t been much research done into feeding cats vegan diets, mostly because it’s a bad idea.
Some great lines:
Cats on a high-protein vegetarian diet exhibited hypokalemia which accompanied recurrent polymyopathy. There was also increased creatinine kinase activity, likely reflecting the muscle damage caused by the myopathy, and reduced urinary potassium concentrations.
To simplify: even with protein supplements your cats muscles will decay over time.
showed that plasma taurine concentrations decreased by approximately 87% after only 2 weeks on a vegetarian diet (from 122 μmol/L to 16μmol/L). By the end of the 6-week study, there was no detectable taurine in plasma. Taurine concentrations were not different between the potassium-supplemented and non-supplemented groups, with both groups showing this substantial drop in taurine.
To simplify: Taurine supplements didn’t work. Though findings are mixed between all like, 3 studies that tried
In cats fed vegetarian diets that were supplemented with potassium, a myopathy was seen within 2 weeks of the dietary change this was characterized by ventroflexion of the head and the neck. The cats also showed lateral head resting, a stiff gait, muscular weakness, unsteadiness, and the occasional tremor of the head and pinnae.
To simplify: your car feels like shit and acts like they feel like shit
Weight loss and poor coat condition have also been observed in cats fed vegetarian diets. However, most cats in another study had a normal coat condition and no obviously diet-related clinical abnormalities removedd up by clinical examination [27]. Clinical signs of lethargy with altered mentation, dysorexia, and muscle wasting, along with gut signs of bloating and increased borborygmi have also been observed [30].
Simplify: it was bad. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but lots of times it was bad and the owner should feel bad
I can keep going, literally every paragraph has some good “don’t fucking do that” material.
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.
And veganism is about living a lifestyle that causes the least amount of suffering. And not solely about not eating animal products. (Cultivated meat can be considered vegan, if it has been produced ethically and no animals or humans suffered) Not giving your cat meat causes suffering so is by definition not vegan.
Side note: Veganism is also about reducing human suffering so cocaine is not vegan. Just a reminder to vegans who use cocaine. Met a bunch of those last week.
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.
The premise of your previous comment was that regardless of the health effects (ie: if vegan cat food is healthy), the cats didn’t consent to it. That argument doesn’t make any sense. I don’t disagree that cats need proper nutrition, again, I feed my cat meat. I just think your argument based on consent is not well founded and there are better ways to argue your point without making a strange implication about ignoring consent. I don’t think forcing a cat to be vegan is okay, unless that diet is properly supplemented with all the nutrients the cat needs, which may or may not be possible. I don’t know. Again, I’m not arguing for cats to be fed vegan. I’m arguing against using consent as the angle against veganism, because that opens up a whole can of worms as to hypocrisy. I’m not vegan, and there are perfectly good reasons to be or not be vegan, but animal consent definitely isn’t an argument to be made against veganism unless you want to confront the issues with animals just as intelligent as cats, or more, being consumed as food.
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 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.
A lot of vegans will hate this, but YOU’RE NOT A FUCKING SCIENTIST! Drop all the journals and research you want, but your pet is not a lab-controlled experiment. Besides, something being in a journal doesn’t make it true. If it is regularly cited as true, and has swept into general understanding of how to feed a pet, then it’s factual…
I’m all for vegans living their best lives. Don’t force it on a pet that doesn’t know better. Vegans harming animals through their own food choices isn’t a new thing, ask most vets and they’ll have seen the effects of malnutrition from someone that thought that they knew better.
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.
There are plenty of vegan friendly pets to choose from too. Rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, chinchillas, pygmy goats ect. If they are willing to accept insectivorous animals that list gets longer.
Why choose a pet like a cat if their diet is a philosophical problem for them? Choose a different animal.
I’m aware of some vegans stances being against having pets, but if people are feeding their cats and dogs a vegan diet at least some portion of vegans aren’t against it.
For folks who want pets who are also vegan they should choose a species compatible with that instead of forcing it on an animal who’s biology isn’t going to thrive under those conditions.
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.
Thank you for the summary! I found myself in OP. I am eating mostly vegan, and I have a cat, and I believe people who force a vegan (or even vegetarian) diet on their cats need mental help.
Well put. Cats are OBLIGATE carnivores. They do not have anatomy to support extracting necessary nutrition from vegan sources that are available. It IS hypothetically possibly for them to survive and thrive on an engineered food source but, such a thing does not currently exist and the chemical complexity makes it unlikely in the near future.
Maybe whataboutism here but there are beagles in the UK right now waiting to be experimented on them (possibly for a new dog food brand) and eventually killed. There are billions of animals all around the world dying a slow and agonizing death, trapped in CAFO facilities right now, of whom 20% alone are getting fed to dogs in the US.
I think some cat getting fed a well formulated vegan cat food containing taurine, vitamin A & D3, omega 3 & 6, magnesium, copper, iodine, selenium, manganese, zink & calcium is astronomically better off than any aforementioned animals.
I fed a cat I had to take in for some time the AMI brand. She was wild for it.
That’s half the point. These people are destroying what they love through their own malice and stupidity. I’d rather they didn’t, but since they’re not stopping any time soon I might as well laugh at them for it.
Was this the article that started it? Do you have the thread or would an archived link be required to see it?
Vegan versus meat-based cat food: Guardian-reported health outcomes in 1,369 cats, after controlling for feline demographic factors [Andrew Knight, Alexander Bauer, Hazel Brown | Published: September 13, 2023][1]
Abstract
Increasing concerns about environmental sustainability, farmed animal welfare and competition for traditional protein sources, are driving considerable development of alternative pet foods. These include raw meat diets, in vitro meat products, and diets based on novel protein sources including terrestrial plants, insects, yeast, fungi and potentially seaweed. To study health outcomes in cats fed vegan diets compared to those fed meat, we surveyed 1,418 cat guardians, asking about one cat living with them, for at least one year. Among 1,380 respondents involved in cat diet decision-making, health and nutrition was the factor considered most important. 1,369 respondents provided information relating to a single cat fed a meat-based (1,242–91%) or vegan (127–9%) diet for at least a year. We examined seven general indicators of illness. After controlling for age, sex, neutering status and primary location via regression models, the following risk reductions were associated with a vegan diet for average cats: increased veterinary visits– 7.3% reduction, medication use– 14.9% reduction, progression onto therapeutic diet– 54.7% reduction, reported veterinary assessment of being unwell– 3.6% reduction, reported veterinary assessment of more severe illness– 7.6% reduction, guardian opinion of more severe illness– 22.8% reduction. Additionally, the number of health disorders per unwell cat decreased by 15.5%. No reductions were statistically significant. We also examined the prevalence of 22 specific health disorders, using reported veterinary assessments. Forty two percent of cats fed meat, and 37% of those fed vegan diets suffered from at least one disorder. Of these 22 disorders, 15 were most common in cats fed meat, and seven in cats fed vegan diets. Only one difference was statistically significant. Considering these results overall, cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets. This trend was clear and consistent. These results largely concur with previous, similar studies.
Often people watch something like Dominion, get shocked, and decide to go vegan. It’s a purely emotional decision. Don’t expect any rational choices here.
When I made the change, I found that there are three major points that tip people to go vegan. They are: sustainability, health, and morality. And really the former two points boil down to the third if you think of it.
Eating animal products is terrible for the habitat which we call Planet Earth. Cows are one of the leading contributors of methane to the atmosphere, a gas that is 30-90 times more potent as a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. The IPCC is just now, as in the past few years, turning the corner on getting a handle on how to model CH4 as well as its contributing factors to global warming. Then you have to consider the other aspects of animal agriculture like resource demand and waste. Animal agriculture uses a disproportionate amount of water, not only for keeping the animals alive but also for growing the crops to feed the animals. Many times vegans actually raise the point that all the water we use to grow the soy and alfalfa for cows could be diverted to growing crops directly for human consumption. It’s much less water intensive to do so, and we know that some areas of the world are already experiencing climate change in the form of less snow pact accumulating on mountains, countributing to less snow melt and less river water from which we draw for animal agriculture and lots of other uses. If we want to truly grapple with our changing climate, we really ought to change our behaviors about how we use Earth’s natural resources. Ok, what about waste. I’ll talk about this in two ways. First, since more plant agriculture is dedicated to animal consumption and raising than for human consumption, there is a disproportionate amount of fertilizers and pesticides used on that portion of crops. And for farmers, one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to fertilize/innoculate their crops is to be super inefficient in using way more chemicals than what they need to to get the job done. These chemicals don’t holdfast in the soils (since our agricultural practices are also diminishing that too), so they wash off into canals, rivers, and eventually the ocean and aggregate just enough to accelerate local algal growths and deplete oxygen in the sea. This leads to dead zones where aquatic wildlife can’t breath and end up dying. Ok, that’s one aspect of waste. The other essentially follows the same casual relation, where manure if not captured by farmers drains off into waterways, carrying the same chemicals as were applied to the crops initially. Then you have other instances where farmers will manage animal waste and pump it into open pits where innate bacteria will try to reduce the toxicity of that substance over time. The other effect of these open pits is the stench they can originate and send for miles on end. Humans who live in areas nearby these farms have incredible distaste as they feel their quality of life, their clean air is polluted. Then we have to talk about animal agriculture and land use in general. Animal agriculture represents the largest biome on the entire planet. We as humans have domesticated the planet such that wild habitats are the minority today. There is less of the wild today than there has ever been in the history of the human species. These shrinking wild lands means that wild animals have less land to roam and exist in, leading to overcrowding, higher rates of disease contraction, higher rates of competition, and in general extinction. Many scientists attribute parts of the current extinction we’re experiencing, the Sixth Great Extinction, to the habitat lost to animal agriculture. A lot of essential, environmental services that ecosystems provide to help make this planet livable for humans are deteriorating, and who knows if and when we’ll reach tipping points that we can’t return from. Land use can also affect global weather patterns. The Amazon rainforest is one of the largest, single biomes on the planet, and much of it has been deforested to make way for animal agriculture. That rainforest contributes to global geography and meteorology as a sink for tropical storms from the Sahara desert. If the Amazon fundamentally becomes a different biome, then its function may destabilize weather patterns that might make weather worse for other areas in the same region. I haven’t even scratched the surface of environmental effects here.
Ok, then we turn to health. Consuming some animal products contributes to a greater chance of developing cancer, as the WHO classifies red meat for instance as a carcinogen. Another prominent disease that can develop on an animal/carnist diet is cardiovascular disease. People have heart attacks younger and younger as a result of this, which might be a contributing factor to countries like the US experiencing lifetimes decreasing as opposed to lifetimes increasing in other countries around the world. Let’s talk about the contamination issue. Animal products like milk, cheese, and meat all tend to be recalled more than plant products because of the associated risk of disease within the products themselves. And when plant products are recalled, it’s likely because there was cross contamination from animal products somewhere along the supply chain. Animal products also introduce more cholesterol to the human body than plant products. Cholesterol is one of the leading factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, like I mentioned before, but in this sense animal products promote Low Density Lipoprotein (LDLs) production as opposed to High Density Lipoproteins (HDLs) in the blood. When you have more of the former and less of the latter, less cholesterol is swept up from the blood stream and taken to cells, meaning more free cholesterol floats in your veins. This free cholesterol is what contributes to plaques and blockages. There are more heavy metals concentrated in animal products too. It is often thought of by biologists that the more you ascend the food chain/web, the more heavy metals like mercury and lead build up. The is especially true with fish. So, if you eat animal products, there is a greater chance you introduce these poisons to your body that your body has to work harder to filter out and remove. People often say that vegans don’t get enough nutrients on their diet compared to omnivores/carnists. B12 is really the only nutrient that’s an issue there, with all other vitamins being supplied in abundance on a whole foods diet. Many omnivores/carnists are actually deficient in vitamins and minerals themselves, like in magnesium, zinc, and K2. A lack of magnesium, for instance, can lead to detrimental impacts on the brain over time (just as B12, mind you). Those are readily available from plant foods, but not so in animal foods. A lot of people suffer from allergies that develop from consuming animal products, and plant foods offer that escape to have good food without the downsides.
Lastly, we have morality. Animal agriculture existing is a form of genocide and oppression on a specific group for no other reason than to extract their resources for human pleasure/gain. This is no different than how humans treat other humans, especially so in the 3rd world. If anyone in this comments section believes in the emancipation of the Palestinian people, for instance, or of the countless others forced as slaves in the fishing industry (an added bonus against animal agriculture), sex work industry, agriculture, textiles, mining, etc., then your argument must also apply to animals. Humans are biologically capable of surviving and thriving on whole food plant based diets, and our choice to continue our damnation of animals is immoral and unethical. The leading practice for meat processors to turn live, emotion, morally worthy beings like cows, pigs, and sheep into commodity products is by first using gas chambers on them to asphyxiate and kill. The last time humans used gas chambers on other humans was during WWII when the Nazis mass slaughtered people of a common creed: the Jewish people. Nazis were and still are considered the absolute worst moral offenders in the entire history of the human species. The fact that we’ve continued their practices, this time only applying them to a group that has no voice to speak out against or warn others about is cruel, unusual, reprehensible, and condemnable. If you support animal agriculture today, you support Nazism. If you don’t, think about changing the foods you buy at the supermarket and order at the restaurant. And yes, animals have no voice. We slaughter them for consumption without their consent. We have them as pets without their consent. We take them away from their natural habitats, and use them as emotional support devices without considering what impacts doing so has on THEIR wellbeing. Humans breed animals like this so others might adopt them as pets later for profit, without considering how that impacts the animals themselves. Mothers and children are separated, often at birth, and fanned off to pet owners before those crucial, biological, sociological, psychological bonds develop between offspring and parent. This happens too when calves and piglets and chicks are separated from their mothers, causing distress for both individuals that can emotionally scar them for life. Again, if you were against what Donald Trump during his presidency did to Hispanic families trying to cross the southern border of the US, with border agents ripping children away from their mothers and fathers with no prospects of the two ever returning, then you MUST be against the same actions that happen to animals. Again, animals can’t communicate as effectively to us what they’re feeling or going through, so it’s even worse for them, and we have an even greater obligation to stop and do something about it. Animal agriculture also involves rape. Farmers often have to artificially impregnate cows such that they’ll produce calves, and the more coveted item, milk. I could go on and on and on but I’m out of text.
We slaughter them for consumption without their consent
it’s absurd do discuss consent from something that cannot be informed. do you get consent from a door before you jam your keys in its holes? do you get consent before you put your whole body through it?
Humans are biologically capable of surviving and thriving on whole food plant based diets, and our choice to continue our damnation of animals is immoral and unethical.
this might be true for some people, but i think you will find that most people will say they need meat or dairy or eggs.
If anyone in this comments section believes in the emancipation of the Palestinian people, for instance, or of the countless others forced as slaves in the fishing industry (an added bonus against animal agriculture), sex work industry, agriculture, textiles, mining, etc., then your argument must also apply to animals.
. First, since more plant agriculture is dedicated to animal consumption and raising than for human consumption, there is a disproportionate amount of fertilizers and pesticides used on that portion of crops
this is simply untrue. globally, about 2/3 of all our crop calories go to humans, and, by and large, what is fed to livestock are parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat.
when plant products are recalled, it’s likely because there was cross contamination from animal products somewhere along the supply chain
broccoli or lettuce covered in e. coli is not due to cross contamination with animal products, it’s due to inhumane working conditions or simply bad farming practices. you’re really stretching on this one
Again, if you were against what Donald Trump during his presidency did to Hispanic families trying to cross the southern border of the US, with border agents ripping children away from their mothers and fathers with no prospects of the two ever returning, then you MUST be against the same actions that happen to animals.
Many times vegans actually raise the point that all the water we use to grow the soy
the vast majority of the global soy crop (about 85%) is pressed for soybean oil for human use. the waste product from that process is called soy cake, and if it were not fed to livestock, it would simply be industrial waste. feeding soy to livestock is a conservation of resources.
Animal agriculture uses a disproportionate amount of water, not only for keeping the animals alive but also for growing the crops to feed the animals.
water isn’t destroyed by being used for animals to eat or drink. even if it were (which makes no sense and, again, is not true), using water to make food is a good use for water. additionally, myopically focusing on any single metric really harms our understanding of the system as a whole. for instance, cows are fed cottonseed, but cotton isn’t grown for cottonseed: it’s a waste product. why should the crop weight of cottonseed be calculated as a portion of the water use of cows, when that’s a conservation of resources? it shouldn’t. this metric is a red herring.
Using water to make food is a good use so long as it doesn’t led to waste on the part of us humans throwing that food out. This is a larger issue than just animal agriculture, but animal products have larger water footprints and consequently make up a higher proportion of that waste.
Also, water isn’t destroyed, but it’s extracted and shipped to other parts of the planet. This virtually eliminates the water present in the origin biome. Again, this issue cuts across animal and plant agriculture, but animal products have a higher water footprint and make up a higher proportion of that water displacement.
I think my original comment points to a greater understanding of the system wholistically than any of your one-off comments have. If you want to convince the viewer of this point, do my comment but better.
Cottonseed isn’t the only feedstock for animal agriculture. Soy, grain, and corn are all others. The fact that cottonseed is utilized doesn’t negate the utilization of other crops farmed specifically for animal agriculture, and not as a byproduct of another industry. That byproduct could be used for other purposes, including continuation of cotton farmers’ own biostock for future plantings. But of course most cotton grown around the world is genetically modified to withstand fungicides, and these fungicides don’t just wash off. Many people have allergic reactions to cotton depending on how it’s grown and where it’s sourced. Imagine now that that cottonseed is going into your food supply, where it doesn’t go away.
I think that the circular economy is a virtue and we as a species should aim for it, but you pointing to cottonseed metrics ignores the larger variables associated with soy, corn, grain, and alfalfa. Those crops are all grown directly, not indirectly in the case of cottonseed, for animal agriculture, and do not offset the savings you get from using a byproduct.
Hell yeah! Nobody should force their choices on any living animal. It’s very bad for a cat to force it on a vegan diet, and it’s very bad for a fish to force it to be cat food. Obviously the cat should only eat lab meat.
My research said that it can work if you do it right. It is very hard and requires constant monitoring of the dog. I wouldn’t recommend it but it will work better than cats. The problem I can forsee is a vegan owner moving there dog to a vegan diet and then refusing to accept that that there dog is having health issues because of it. They would need to be willing to start giving there dog regular food again but I don’t see the extreme vegans doing that. They will likely just shove there head in the sand or blame something else like the vet.
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.
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.
No, they’re hypocrites. These are practices that vegans should not be ok with, and said actions certain don’t constitute a harmonious world view and philosophy. They should be ashamed of themselves. The real actions and ideas they should be putting forward is to not have pets, and to try to reduce invasive species impacts on local ecosystems (in which case cats are neutered to stop reproduction).
It’s a microcosm for science denial or misunderstanding of all kinds. Vegan cats and antivax may not seem related but the underlying misinformation is not dissimilar.
I tried following up on the vegan cat research being posted and it was very difficult to get a solid answer. There are multiple brands of vegan cat food marketed and sold, and it isn’t outrageous to believe that our industrial society could find an ethical way to source the necessary nutrients and enrich the cat food.
But also there’s very few studies that test the claims of the vegan cat food. What few meta-analysis exist, and anecdotes online, would suggest that all those foods lack certain critical nutrients for long-term feline health. But the anecdotes are drowned out by well-intentioned people who want to believe it works, and the studies are small, rare, hard to read, and locked behind paywalls.
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.
The reason cats can’t be vegan is that they cannot produce an amino acid called taurine, which is something dogs and humans can produce (but which we also get sometimes from dietary sources).
Most dietary sources of taurine are meat. This is why dogs and humans “can be vegan” but cats “can’t”. However, vegan taurine is made and can be bought as a supplement, both for humans (if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet), but also in properly made vegan cat food.
It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild (where the only source of taurine is meat) and you can’t just start to feed them a vegan diet without taurine and expect the cat to be healthy and survive.
In fact, cats fed a proper vegan diet tend to have better health:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499249/
I think the question is really what you are feeding your “vegan” cat: if you have managed to find (or make) a properly fortified vegan cat food it is theoretically possible to feed your cat a vegan diet.
This all feels a bit like the “controversy” around feeding young children and babies a vegan diet: done poorly it can be catastrophic (pun not intended), but it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet when enough effort is put into ensuring nutritional needs are actually satisfied.
That said, I also know of two other vegan responses:
Cats have dietary needs that would require them to eat meat in nature. 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 understand why people upvote summaries that don’t even try to be objective. I honestly think the mods there do notably abuse their power to remove comments, but let people decide that for themselves. This commenter is telling you who to support while being confidently incorrect on the original issue.
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.
A vet friend in a very trendy city encounters a lot of cats with significant health problems that stem from their owner’s attempt at a vegan diet, so whether or not it’s possible, too many people harm the health of their pets through attempting a vegan diet for it to be a safe thing to recommend trying
Yea that’s the thing.
I’m sure a team of scientists could eventually design an ethically sourced vegan cat food with synthetic versions of whatever is missing that could work fine for some cats.
The odds of a random lemming doing it right after reading one comment about it online is next to none.
Discussing it is one thing, recommending it and deleting anything that simply advises caution is weird.
First of all, that analysis you posted is not particularly scientific, and there’s an abundance of evidence that vegan diets hurt cats.
Second, once you’re getting into arguments about “synthetic nutrients”, it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know how animals nutrition works, and probably shouldn’t have a pet at all if you don’t know how to keep one without making it suffer due to malnutrition.
Not sure why you’re vegan, but it certainly isn’t because you care about the well-being of animals…
heavy sigh
Vegans be reposting this link everywhere not realizing how silly it makes them look. First, one of its big points is that there hasn’t been much research done into feeding cats vegan diets, mostly because it’s a bad idea.
Some great lines:
To simplify: even with protein supplements your cats muscles will decay over time.
To simplify: Taurine supplements didn’t work. Though findings are mixed between all like, 3 studies that tried
To simplify: your car feels like shit and acts like they feel like shit
Simplify: it was bad. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but lots of times it was bad and the owner should feel bad
I can keep going, literally every paragraph has some good “don’t fucking do that” material.
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.
And veganism is about living a lifestyle that causes the least amount of suffering. And not solely about not eating animal products. (Cultivated meat can be considered vegan, if it has been produced ethically and no animals or humans suffered) Not giving your cat meat causes suffering so is by definition not vegan.
Side note: Veganism is also about reducing human suffering so cocaine is not vegan. Just a reminder to vegans who use cocaine. Met a bunch of those last week.
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.
The premise of your previous comment was that regardless of the health effects (ie: if vegan cat food is healthy), the cats didn’t consent to it. That argument doesn’t make any sense. I don’t disagree that cats need proper nutrition, again, I feed my cat meat. I just think your argument based on consent is not well founded and there are better ways to argue your point without making a strange implication about ignoring consent. I don’t think forcing a cat to be vegan is okay, unless that diet is properly supplemented with all the nutrients the cat needs, which may or may not be possible. I don’t know. Again, I’m not arguing for cats to be fed vegan. I’m arguing against using consent as the angle against veganism, because that opens up a whole can of worms as to hypocrisy. I’m not vegan, and there are perfectly good reasons to be or not be vegan, but animal consent definitely isn’t an argument to be made against veganism unless you want to confront the issues with animals just as intelligent as cats, or more, being consumed as food.
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.
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.
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.
they can’t be vegan as that is an ethical choice. they can be plant based and live a perfectly normal life.
tell me where you disagree with this guy:
https://youtu.be/YxjGa0MXfAc
This asshole is a propagandist
a guy who is a professor of animal welfare?
A lot of vegans will hate this, but YOU’RE NOT A FUCKING SCIENTIST! Drop all the journals and research you want, but your pet is not a lab-controlled experiment. Besides, something being in a journal doesn’t make it true. If it is regularly cited as true, and has swept into general understanding of how to feed a pet, then it’s factual…
I’m all for vegans living their best lives. Don’t force it on a pet that doesn’t know better. Vegans harming animals through their own food choices isn’t a new thing, ask most vets and they’ll have seen the effects of malnutrition from someone that thought that they knew better.
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.
There are plenty of vegan friendly pets to choose from too. Rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, chinchillas, pygmy goats ect. If they are willing to accept insectivorous animals that list gets longer.
Why choose a pet like a cat if their diet is a philosophical problem for them? Choose a different animal.
A lot of vegans seem to view even owning a pet, of any kind, as evil.
I’m aware of some vegans stances being against having pets, but if people are feeding their cats and dogs a vegan diet at least some portion of vegans aren’t against it.
For folks who want pets who are also vegan they should choose a species compatible with that instead of forcing it on an animal who’s biology isn’t going to thrive under those conditions.
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.
Thank you for the summary! I found myself in OP. I am eating mostly vegan, and I have a cat, and I believe people who force a vegan (or even vegetarian) diet on their cats need mental help.
Well put. Cats are OBLIGATE carnivores. They do not have anatomy to support extracting necessary nutrition from vegan sources that are available. It IS hypothetically possibly for them to survive and thrive on an engineered food source but, such a thing does not currently exist and the chemical complexity makes it unlikely in the near future.
I’m pretty sure energy drinks might use synthetic taurine on a large scale, have we tried feeding cats Monster Energy? /s
this is hilarious, and 100% on brand for a vegan community.
It really isn’t funny as there are real animals being harmed. There pet will die a slow and agonizing death.
Maybe whataboutism here but there are beagles in the UK right now waiting to be experimented on them (possibly for a new dog food brand) and eventually killed. There are billions of animals all around the world dying a slow and agonizing death, trapped in CAFO facilities right now, of whom 20% alone are getting fed to dogs in the US.
I think some cat getting fed a well formulated vegan cat food containing taurine, vitamin A & D3, omega 3 & 6, magnesium, copper, iodine, selenium, manganese, zink & calcium is astronomically better off than any aforementioned animals.
I fed a cat I had to take in for some time the AMI brand. She was wild for it.
That’s half the point. These people are destroying what they love through their own malice and stupidity. I’d rather they didn’t, but since they’re not stopping any time soon I might as well laugh at them for it.
Was this the article that started it? Do you have the thread or would an archived link be required to see it?
Vegan versus meat-based cat food: Guardian-reported health outcomes in 1,369 cats, after controlling for feline demographic factors [Andrew Knight, Alexander Bauer, Hazel Brown | Published: September 13, 2023][1]
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284132 ↩︎
Abstract states vegan cats are healthier, but fig. 4 would suggest that they live shorter (or are at least younger)
Is this your first time reading a vegan propaganda study?
Why do people even try to keep cats on vegan diet? It was your fucking choice, not the cats.
Im vegetarian, my cat eats meat. Im not gonna force anything on him unless he comes to me and tells me he wants to try it.
Often people watch something like Dominion, get shocked, and decide to go vegan. It’s a purely emotional decision. Don’t expect any rational choices here.
When I made the change, I found that there are three major points that tip people to go vegan. They are: sustainability, health, and morality. And really the former two points boil down to the third if you think of it.
Eating animal products is terrible for the habitat which we call Planet Earth. Cows are one of the leading contributors of methane to the atmosphere, a gas that is 30-90 times more potent as a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. The IPCC is just now, as in the past few years, turning the corner on getting a handle on how to model CH4 as well as its contributing factors to global warming. Then you have to consider the other aspects of animal agriculture like resource demand and waste. Animal agriculture uses a disproportionate amount of water, not only for keeping the animals alive but also for growing the crops to feed the animals. Many times vegans actually raise the point that all the water we use to grow the soy and alfalfa for cows could be diverted to growing crops directly for human consumption. It’s much less water intensive to do so, and we know that some areas of the world are already experiencing climate change in the form of less snow pact accumulating on mountains, countributing to less snow melt and less river water from which we draw for animal agriculture and lots of other uses. If we want to truly grapple with our changing climate, we really ought to change our behaviors about how we use Earth’s natural resources. Ok, what about waste. I’ll talk about this in two ways. First, since more plant agriculture is dedicated to animal consumption and raising than for human consumption, there is a disproportionate amount of fertilizers and pesticides used on that portion of crops. And for farmers, one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to fertilize/innoculate their crops is to be super inefficient in using way more chemicals than what they need to to get the job done. These chemicals don’t holdfast in the soils (since our agricultural practices are also diminishing that too), so they wash off into canals, rivers, and eventually the ocean and aggregate just enough to accelerate local algal growths and deplete oxygen in the sea. This leads to dead zones where aquatic wildlife can’t breath and end up dying. Ok, that’s one aspect of waste. The other essentially follows the same casual relation, where manure if not captured by farmers drains off into waterways, carrying the same chemicals as were applied to the crops initially. Then you have other instances where farmers will manage animal waste and pump it into open pits where innate bacteria will try to reduce the toxicity of that substance over time. The other effect of these open pits is the stench they can originate and send for miles on end. Humans who live in areas nearby these farms have incredible distaste as they feel their quality of life, their clean air is polluted. Then we have to talk about animal agriculture and land use in general. Animal agriculture represents the largest biome on the entire planet. We as humans have domesticated the planet such that wild habitats are the minority today. There is less of the wild today than there has ever been in the history of the human species. These shrinking wild lands means that wild animals have less land to roam and exist in, leading to overcrowding, higher rates of disease contraction, higher rates of competition, and in general extinction. Many scientists attribute parts of the current extinction we’re experiencing, the Sixth Great Extinction, to the habitat lost to animal agriculture. A lot of essential, environmental services that ecosystems provide to help make this planet livable for humans are deteriorating, and who knows if and when we’ll reach tipping points that we can’t return from. Land use can also affect global weather patterns. The Amazon rainforest is one of the largest, single biomes on the planet, and much of it has been deforested to make way for animal agriculture. That rainforest contributes to global geography and meteorology as a sink for tropical storms from the Sahara desert. If the Amazon fundamentally becomes a different biome, then its function may destabilize weather patterns that might make weather worse for other areas in the same region. I haven’t even scratched the surface of environmental effects here.
Ok, then we turn to health. Consuming some animal products contributes to a greater chance of developing cancer, as the WHO classifies red meat for instance as a carcinogen. Another prominent disease that can develop on an animal/carnist diet is cardiovascular disease. People have heart attacks younger and younger as a result of this, which might be a contributing factor to countries like the US experiencing lifetimes decreasing as opposed to lifetimes increasing in other countries around the world. Let’s talk about the contamination issue. Animal products like milk, cheese, and meat all tend to be recalled more than plant products because of the associated risk of disease within the products themselves. And when plant products are recalled, it’s likely because there was cross contamination from animal products somewhere along the supply chain. Animal products also introduce more cholesterol to the human body than plant products. Cholesterol is one of the leading factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, like I mentioned before, but in this sense animal products promote Low Density Lipoprotein (LDLs) production as opposed to High Density Lipoproteins (HDLs) in the blood. When you have more of the former and less of the latter, less cholesterol is swept up from the blood stream and taken to cells, meaning more free cholesterol floats in your veins. This free cholesterol is what contributes to plaques and blockages. There are more heavy metals concentrated in animal products too. It is often thought of by biologists that the more you ascend the food chain/web, the more heavy metals like mercury and lead build up. The is especially true with fish. So, if you eat animal products, there is a greater chance you introduce these poisons to your body that your body has to work harder to filter out and remove. People often say that vegans don’t get enough nutrients on their diet compared to omnivores/carnists. B12 is really the only nutrient that’s an issue there, with all other vitamins being supplied in abundance on a whole foods diet. Many omnivores/carnists are actually deficient in vitamins and minerals themselves, like in magnesium, zinc, and K2. A lack of magnesium, for instance, can lead to detrimental impacts on the brain over time (just as B12, mind you). Those are readily available from plant foods, but not so in animal foods. A lot of people suffer from allergies that develop from consuming animal products, and plant foods offer that escape to have good food without the downsides.
Lastly, we have morality. Animal agriculture existing is a form of genocide and oppression on a specific group for no other reason than to extract their resources for human pleasure/gain. This is no different than how humans treat other humans, especially so in the 3rd world. If anyone in this comments section believes in the emancipation of the Palestinian people, for instance, or of the countless others forced as slaves in the fishing industry (an added bonus against animal agriculture), sex work industry, agriculture, textiles, mining, etc., then your argument must also apply to animals. Humans are biologically capable of surviving and thriving on whole food plant based diets, and our choice to continue our damnation of animals is immoral and unethical. The leading practice for meat processors to turn live, emotion, morally worthy beings like cows, pigs, and sheep into commodity products is by first using gas chambers on them to asphyxiate and kill. The last time humans used gas chambers on other humans was during WWII when the Nazis mass slaughtered people of a common creed: the Jewish people. Nazis were and still are considered the absolute worst moral offenders in the entire history of the human species. The fact that we’ve continued their practices, this time only applying them to a group that has no voice to speak out against or warn others about is cruel, unusual, reprehensible, and condemnable. If you support animal agriculture today, you support Nazism. If you don’t, think about changing the foods you buy at the supermarket and order at the restaurant. And yes, animals have no voice. We slaughter them for consumption without their consent. We have them as pets without their consent. We take them away from their natural habitats, and use them as emotional support devices without considering what impacts doing so has on THEIR wellbeing. Humans breed animals like this so others might adopt them as pets later for profit, without considering how that impacts the animals themselves. Mothers and children are separated, often at birth, and fanned off to pet owners before those crucial, biological, sociological, psychological bonds develop between offspring and parent. This happens too when calves and piglets and chicks are separated from their mothers, causing distress for both individuals that can emotionally scar them for life. Again, if you were against what Donald Trump during his presidency did to Hispanic families trying to cross the southern border of the US, with border agents ripping children away from their mothers and fathers with no prospects of the two ever returning, then you MUST be against the same actions that happen to animals. Again, animals can’t communicate as effectively to us what they’re feeling or going through, so it’s even worse for them, and we have an even greater obligation to stop and do something about it. Animal agriculture also involves rape. Farmers often have to artificially impregnate cows such that they’ll produce calves, and the more coveted item, milk. I could go on and on and on but I’m out of text.
eating animal products has no impact at all. the problems that exist arise during production.
Eating animals does have impact. It has impact on your body and the animal.
the animal is already dead, and i dont’ see the case that the effects or my own body of me eating food is really a detriment to the environment.
it’s absurd do discuss consent from something that cannot be informed. do you get consent from a door before you jam your keys in its holes? do you get consent before you put your whole body through it?
this might be true for some people, but i think you will find that most people will say they need meat or dairy or eggs.
this isn’t rape. it’s a veterinary procedure.
all of agriculture, including cows, is only about 20% of our ghg emissions. you are using vague and scary language to mislead.
Most agriculture is pursued for feedstock for the animal agriculture industry. This is true all across the planet. Also, CO2 != CH4.
kindly, cite a source.
this bombastic pigeon-holing is laughable. there are plenty of anti-fascist people who eat meat and dairy.
no, it doesn’t.
this is simply untrue. globally, about 2/3 of all our crop calories go to humans, and, by and large, what is fed to livestock are parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat.
broccoli or lettuce covered in e. coli is not due to cross contamination with animal products, it’s due to inhumane working conditions or simply bad farming practices. you’re really stretching on this one
and it was wrong precisely because it treated humans like animals. treating animals like animals is not wrong.
why?
the vast majority of the global soy crop (about 85%) is pressed for soybean oil for human use. the waste product from that process is called soy cake, and if it were not fed to livestock, it would simply be industrial waste. feeding soy to livestock is a conservation of resources.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Global-soy-production-to-end-use.png
water isn’t destroyed by being used for animals to eat or drink. even if it were (which makes no sense and, again, is not true), using water to make food is a good use for water. additionally, myopically focusing on any single metric really harms our understanding of the system as a whole. for instance, cows are fed cottonseed, but cotton isn’t grown for cottonseed: it’s a waste product. why should the crop weight of cottonseed be calculated as a portion of the water use of cows, when that’s a conservation of resources? it shouldn’t. this metric is a red herring.
Using water to make food is a good use so long as it doesn’t led to waste on the part of us humans throwing that food out. This is a larger issue than just animal agriculture, but animal products have larger water footprints and consequently make up a higher proportion of that waste.
Also, water isn’t destroyed, but it’s extracted and shipped to other parts of the planet. This virtually eliminates the water present in the origin biome. Again, this issue cuts across animal and plant agriculture, but animal products have a higher water footprint and make up a higher proportion of that water displacement.
I think my original comment points to a greater understanding of the system wholistically than any of your one-off comments have. If you want to convince the viewer of this point, do my comment but better.
Cottonseed isn’t the only feedstock for animal agriculture. Soy, grain, and corn are all others. The fact that cottonseed is utilized doesn’t negate the utilization of other crops farmed specifically for animal agriculture, and not as a byproduct of another industry. That byproduct could be used for other purposes, including continuation of cotton farmers’ own biostock for future plantings. But of course most cotton grown around the world is genetically modified to withstand fungicides, and these fungicides don’t just wash off. Many people have allergic reactions to cotton depending on how it’s grown and where it’s sourced. Imagine now that that cottonseed is going into your food supply, where it doesn’t go away.
I think that the circular economy is a virtue and we as a species should aim for it, but you pointing to cottonseed metrics ignores the larger variables associated with soy, corn, grain, and alfalfa. Those crops are all grown directly, not indirectly in the case of cottonseed, for animal agriculture, and do not offset the savings you get from using a byproduct.
it’s not genocide: we don’t want to wipe out cows.
Hell yeah! Nobody should force their choices on any living animal. It’s very bad for a cat to force it on a vegan diet, and it’s very bad for a fish to force it to be cat food. Obviously the cat should only eat lab meat.
Making dogs vegan still doesn’t sound like a good idea to me tho
My research said that it can work if you do it right. It is very hard and requires constant monitoring of the dog. I wouldn’t recommend it but it will work better than cats. The problem I can forsee is a vegan owner moving there dog to a vegan diet and then refusing to accept that that there dog is having health issues because of it. They would need to be willing to start giving there dog regular food again but I don’t see the extreme vegans doing that. They will likely just shove there head in the sand or blame something else like the vet.
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.
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.
No, they’re hypocrites. These are practices that vegans should not be ok with, and said actions certain don’t constitute a harmonious world view and philosophy. They should be ashamed of themselves. The real actions and ideas they should be putting forward is to not have pets, and to try to reduce invasive species impacts on local ecosystems (in which case cats are neutered to stop reproduction).
It’s a microcosm for science denial or misunderstanding of all kinds. Vegan cats and antivax may not seem related but the underlying misinformation is not dissimilar.
I tried following up on the vegan cat research being posted and it was very difficult to get a solid answer. There are multiple brands of vegan cat food marketed and sold, and it isn’t outrageous to believe that our industrial society could find an ethical way to source the necessary nutrients and enrich the cat food.
But also there’s very few studies that test the claims of the vegan cat food. What few meta-analysis exist, and anecdotes online, would suggest that all those foods lack certain critical nutrients for long-term feline health. But the anecdotes are drowned out by well-intentioned people who want to believe it works, and the studies are small, rare, hard to read, and locked behind paywalls.