memes

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 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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

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] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284132]

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.

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.

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.

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...

I wish I would understand why people always have to take everything to the extreme. If you get mad about carnivorous pets not being able to follow your personal diet, you're an extremist asshole who just chose veganism as your religion. You can be vegan without being an extremist asshole, so it must be something else causing this.