The animal abuse alleged at the time was that there was supposedly no healthy vegan cat food.
While the section of the rules was the same (violent content), animal abuse was a separate sentence, not the one about visual depictions:
No visual content depicting executions, murder, suicide, dismemberment, visible innards, excessive gore, or charred bodies. No content depicting, promoting or enabling animal abuse. No erotic or otherwise suggestive media or text content featuring depictions of rape, sexual assault, or non-consensual violence. All other violent content should be tagged NSFW.
This is the exact same paragraph we have today and we had before these changes.
If there was no healthy vegan cat food then this would be considered content enabling animal abuse.
This section is fully removed in the next Lemmy release: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2639