this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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I don't have a dog in this race, but it seems to me the obvious answer to your consent dilemma is "no animal consents to being eaten." I feed my cat a non-vegan diet, for the record. I'm just not pretending that the fish likes it or anything. If a perfectly healthy vegan diet is possible for a cat, which I'm honestly not clear on, then it's definitely ethical to do so.
If you extrapolated the moral dilemma to the extreme, it would be like saying "it's unethical to take the knife away from that serial murderer. He just wants to murder and he didn't consent to stopping!" Obviously, that's a ridiculous comparison, but so is making the consent argument. My point isn't that feeding cats meat is wrong (again, I feed my cat meat), it's that making a consent argument against veganism is silly.
True, no animal consents to being eaten, and I understand veganism is meant to eliminate or mitigate unnecessary animal products from one's diet, but I don't think "no animal consents to being eaten" works here. That's nature (and yes, I'm ignoring that humans are part of nature, despite our best efforts to think we aren't), you can't change nature. You're not going to get a lion or a shark to stop being a carnivorous predator because that's just what they are.
I also don't necessarily agree with your knife argument: a serial killer does not need to kill to survive, whereas living things need to eat to survive. I don't think the consent argument is as ridiculous as that, I would more equate it to an infirm cancer patient being given chemotherapy drugs versus homeopathy treatment. They can't consent to either, but one is clearly meant to try to fix the issue, whereas the other is a personal choice.
Veganism is a personal choice, cats needing meat in their diet is not. I have nothing against veganism, and I appreciate your arguments (I hadn't considered the "not consenting to be eaten" aspect). Idk, to me, people who force their diets/lifestyles onto their pets that aren't equipped for it, it's just... Immoral? I'm blanking on the word, it's been a long week.
animals don't consent to anything, any more than trees or machines. it is absurd to discuss consent from something that can not be informed.
The premise of your previous comment was that regardless of the health effects (ie: if vegan cat food is healthy), the cats didn't consent to it. That argument doesn't make any sense. I don't disagree that cats need proper nutrition, again, I feed my cat meat. I just think your argument based on consent is not well founded and there are better ways to argue your point without making a strange implication about ignoring consent. I don't think forcing a cat to be vegan is okay, unless that diet is properly supplemented with all the nutrients the cat needs, which may or may not be possible. I don't know. Again, I'm not arguing for cats to be fed vegan. I'm arguing against using consent as the angle against veganism, because that opens up a whole can of worms as to hypocrisy. I'm not vegan, and there are perfectly good reasons to be or not be vegan, but animal consent definitely isn't an argument to be made against veganism unless you want to confront the issues with animals just as intelligent as cats, or more, being consumed as food.