FediLore + Fedidrama

Obligate Cats are Obligate Carnivores. Also, anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. Cats can't be vegan.

explain why cats nibble house plants then

checkmate atheists

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.

Right?

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.

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?

Interesting to see 10 downvotes for 27 upvotes, seems like people want to have that debate again.

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.

Note you can even edit the image you posted

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.