this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Carnivorism isn't a biological characteristic of cats. It's a biological characteristic of cat food. Cat food changed.
If cats are still carnivores, then so are pandas.
I mean yeah, pandas way prefer field mice and such, they’re just too slow and stupid to catch anything other than bamboo though
Horses will also opportunistically eat meat if it's available. Are horses carnivores?
Omnivores apparently, same as pandas.
Same as most things on earth, hell even pure herbivores have been known to eat their babies to recover the lost protein and such.
I can’t think of any animal on earth that is pure veggie.
Even hummingbirds pick small insects over nectar whenever possible.
Weird, it’s almost like life is complex and doesn’t fit neatly into boxes like we would like
You're right, nothing on earth is a herbivore, because everything can eat meat. By the same logic, nothing is a carnivore, because everything, cats included, can eat plants. Therefore, cats are not carnivores. They're omnivores, as you say.
Damn you've got some goofy opinions sometimes.
Nobody has made a case for why cats are carnivores and pandas aren't. It's just that pandas have been eating bamboo for a long time, and these people were all born before synthetic taurine became widespread. It's refusal to change, they think the world is and always will be the way it was when they were a kid. The world moved on without them and they haven't noticed yet.
Their biology is still that of a carnivore.
"The cat (Felis catus), also referred to as domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat
"A carnivore, or meat-eater (... Removed for brevity...), is an animal or plant whose nutrition and energy requirements are met by consumption of animal tissues (mainly muscle, fat and other soft tissues) as food, whether through predation or scavenging." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore
Further down on that same article, under characteristics:
"Characteristics commonly associated with carnivores include strength, speed, and keen senses for hunting, as well as teeth and claws for capturing and tearing prey."
"Carnivores have comparatively short digestive systems, as they are not required to break down the tough cellulose found in plants."
"Many hunting animals have evolved eyes facing forward, enabling depth perception. This is almost universal among mammalian predators"
Scientifically, according to their biological makeup, and nutritional requirements, cats meet all the criteria for predatory carnivores.
This is their biology. I'm not arguing for or against any science that makes them no longer required to eat actual prey/flesh that they needed to hunt and kill themselves. Biologically, their characteristics, digestion, and by proxy, their nutritional requirements, very solidly put them into the scientific category of carnivores.
One of the chief biological indicators of a carnivore vs an herbivore is digestion. Whether the animals digestive tract is designed to break down the cellular walls of plant matter. Cats lack the biological capability to break down the cellular walls in plants because of how their digestive system is configured.
Among everything else that points to them being a carnivore, that's a big one....
Just because they can get the nutrition they need from not being a carnivore doesn't change their scientific classification as a carnivore. They've evolved into efficient hunters, and though, for domestic cats, they are not required to hunt to live, they have all the tools for it.
Until they evolve to be capable of digesting plant matter more efficiently, that classification will remain unchanged. Regardless of whatever pseudo-science you want to convince yourself of.
That's not science, that's religion. You're talking about destiny. You're saying cats have an essential nature which is not affected by the conditions of their lives. That the physical reality of what a cat eats does not determine its diet, that there exists a deeper truth based on what nature "intended". Nature doesn't have intentions. Cats were not created by an omnipotent god. Their place in the world, their role as animals, their diet, is malleable. And it changed a long, long time ago. Humans get to decide what cats are, and they've been deciding it for thousands of years. Humans decided to create a technology that makes cats no longer carnivores. You're citing outdated information. You might as well say pandas are carnivores.
It's almost as if you don't understand any of the words you just wrote. Carnivorism is a descriptor used for animals, not their food. I don't say "hey is that cat food a carnivore" because I don't want to sound like an idiot. Cats bodies are evolved to digest meat and not plants. The fact that humans took all the components of meat and put it into a dry food doesn't change the evolutionary status of the cat.
So you think pandas are carnivores? If that's the case, then whether cats are carnivores is irrelevant to this whole discussion.