They can be, but it cost a lot of money, and you need to constantly be monitoring them by testing their urine at home. And if things aren't going well, you need to get to a vet asap.
Or, you can just feed them the fish scraps that would otherwise be thrown out. Additional fish aren't being killed, and you don't need to be worried that you're causing additional harm to the cat.
Even granting that cats can be sustained on a diet of substances derived entirely by plants, cats can't actually be vegan. Veganism is a philosophy of what it means to be a person and how humans should live, which cats don't really have the brain structure to do. Even if you ignore that fact, cats are (I'm saying this as someone who loves cats) psychopathic little murderers; no matter how well-fed a cat is, it will still instinctively kill prey animals. Cats on the hunt will sometimes kill something to eat, see a new bit of prey, abandon their old kill, and hunt the new thing. Cats cannot be vegan.
I've seen stuff online about people trying to feed their pets vegan diets. It's more commonly dogs, but cats crop up every now and again...
I'm just saying that some people are stupid enough to try to make all their pets eat a vegan diet regardless of the nutritional requirements that each pet may have.
So yes. Some people are trying to claim otherwise. They're idiots, and they may not be here on Lemmy right now, but they exist.
I'm the super paranoid guy about all of this stuff and this exact same thing occurred to me
Why are there a few different changes to sub and site policy connected with the concept of "misinformation", but somehow skirting around the type of misinformation which it seems is the most pressing issue by far? I.e. accounts which are devoted to posting misinformation?
Honestly I thought the vegan cat food thing was handled semi ok. But surely that's not the more pressing thing, to justify big team meetings and huge changes to policy and writing misinformation stuff into the legal side and user agreement.
Seemed an important changes to me as well, but I guess they had the MBFC bot thing happening at the same time and wanted to hit two birds with one stone? Not sure to be honest
Hurr hurr vegans are an easy target, I get it. In fact, I enjoy making fun of them as much as anyone else.
It's actually blowing my mind that so many people actually seem completely illiterate and keep bringing up the vegan thing instead of looking at the real issue: LW mods admins doing whatever they want, then changing the rules to justify their behavior, then today releasing a nothingburger statement patting themselves on the back about the whole thing.
I get that they don't want to fire someone over a one time issue, but maybe tell the guy to stfu and just work on coding things instead of interacting with the community?
As someone who has fucked up similarly before in a different context, both of those things happened. I got put in my place, we agreed I was going to adjust my attitude, ate my warning, and the outward conversation was that the problem was resolved and we'd work on being better in the future.
I'm not a vegan. But my $.02 as a cat person is this: the cat has biological dietary requirements. If you fail to meet those requirements, it is animal abuse.
By trying to squeeze a cat, an obligate carnivore in nature, into a vegan diet, either you have to be extremely careful about it to ensure you meet all their nutritional needs, or simply, and far more easily, just don't do it.
Encouraging people who likely do not have the means or expertise to monitor how their pet is doing, to switch them to a vegan diet, is dangerous to the health of the animal.
I'm not sure I disagree with the admin on this one, though there's probably a better way they could have handled it.
You don't have to be super careful. You just have to make sure they get enough taurine. Any number of off the shelf products have sufficient synthetic taurine for a cat to thrive. It doesn't make sense to get all freaked out about this one nutrient when you trust the pet food manufacturer for every other essential nutrient the cat would die without.
It's been infuriating seeing everyone's reactions devolve into dunking on vegans about vegan cat food instead of the overreaction of Rookie. So I will say that it IS possible for a cat to have a vegan diet as long as the essential nutrients are supplemented and you work with a vet. One big thing is taurine, but the way meat is processed in cat food removes the taurine so it is added back with synthetic taurine anyway. Like just read the actual thread Rookie freaked out on. No one was saying only feed your cat vegetables and hope for the best.
Also people using obligate carnivore but not understanding what it means. What is an obligate carnivore?
"Some carnivores, particularly cats (family Felidae), are obligate carnivores, meaning they cannot obtain all the nutrients that they need from the plant kingdom and bacteria. In particular, obligate carnivores lack the enzyme needed to split carotene, obtained from plants, into vitamin A. Instead, these animals obtain vitamin A from the liver of their prey. Obligate carnivores are similarly unable to synthesize some essential very-long-chain, highly unsaturated fatty acids that other animals can make from shorter fatty acids found in plant."
So, an obligate carnivore is an animal that needs to (is obligated to) obtain some nutrients by eating the flesh of other animals (or those nutrients would have to be supplied in a form the cat can absorb by means of supplementation). Cats do not have the long digestive tracts of ruminants to efficiently ferment raw starch or fiber, but that doesn’t mean they cannot digest plant matter at all. It also does not mean they are unable to obtain any nutrients from plants or from fiber. However, being an obligate carnivore does mean that their diet MUST provide certain nutrients from the flesh of other animals or from supplementation.
Studies on cats eating a vegan diet? Science says we need more studies because it is not as black and white as all the people kneejerking about it are saying.
Whilst the quality and amount of evidence needs to be considered in formulating recommendations, there was no overwhelming evidence of adverse effects arising from use of these diets and there was some evidence of benefits. It is, however, recommended that future high-quality studies, with standardized outcome measures and large sample sizes, be conducted. At the current time, if guardians wish to feed their companion animals vegan diets, a cautious approach should be taken using commercially produced diets which have been formulated considering the nutritional needs of the target species.
I learned a lot by listening to the original commenters instead of circlejerking about vegans bad amirite. But I couldn't possibly reply to every comment with this so I'll leave it here instead. There is a reason I don't use a Lemmy.world account, their moderation sucks.
Well the way I was thinking is that in order to talk about how Rookie overreacted and fucked up, I would have to get people to look at the original thread and establish why this was not animal abuse or misinformation. Many people have not read the original thread. It was not animal abuse to talk about how cats can theoretically be vegan and talk about the studies that support it. Rookie decided this was animal abuse and misinformation and removed the whole mod team while power tripping when it wasn't against any rules. Now LW has rules about misinformation as if to back up Rookie being able to do this again. The mods were restored but people keep thinking Rookie was justified. It just blows my mind. I'm also not the only one talking about obligate carnivores and cats being vegan on this post, I'm just the only one that read the original thread and am encouraging others to see how Rookie messed up and this was an extreme overreaction rather than more circlejerking vegans bad. Reddit doesn't even get this bad, LW seems like they want to be a mini reddit but worse.
I hope this is okay, we were discussing in this thread (https://feddit.org/post/2379333/1721964 ) a potential community for Fediverse memes, I guess this might be the closest as it documents somehow what happened in the drama?
I haven’t looked into the drama that much, but isn’t the cat diet debate extremely relevant to the admin action? Whether or not it was animal abuse, therefore would it be against the instance rules?
Yeah but from what I can tell the people who are feeding their cats non meats are way too adverse to acknowledging that they're wrong and have been tripling down at every opportunity
Regardless of whether the initial actions from the admin were justified, although I think they were.
Their response was to ban the admin, and reinstate a number of comments they had deleted, which is completely out of line. I think they actually got off lightly, all things considered.
Nothing about their biology changed so that they're no longer classifiable as a carnivore.
Scientifically, they have all the traits of a carnivore, and a predator.
You can't redefine "cat" because we can use supplements to round out their dietary needs.
What you said is like, oh Dracula isn't a vampire anymore, because we found a way to give him an artificial blood substitute that completes his dietary needs....
.... He's still a vampire, he's just getting his fix from something other than a living person.