Did I say I thought pandas are carnivores? I don't remember talking about that at all.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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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
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.
https://lemmy.world/post/18691022
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.
https://rawfedandnerdy.com/what-is-an-obligate-carnivore
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/
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.
The meme is literally about you lol
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.
Note you can even edit the image you posted
I know, but it was late for me and I didn't want to do it again. Might do later today
The future is now baby. I wonder how that will throw a wrench in some moderation systems, actually.
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.
I assume you have a doctorate in veterinary care on which you've based this statement?
Cats used to be carnivores back when taurine could only be found in meat, but humans invented synthetic taurine and cats aren't carnivores anymore
No no, they're still carnivores.
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.
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.
scientifically, an organism that does not eat meat is a meat eater.
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.
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.
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