Obligate Cats are Obligate Carnivores. Also, anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. Cats can’t be vegan.
They can be, but it cost a lot of money, and you need to constantly be monitoring them by testing their urine at home. And if things aren’t going well, you need to get to a vet asap.
Or, you can just feed them the fish scraps that would otherwise be thrown out. Additional fish aren’t being killed, and you don’t need to be worried that you’re causing additional harm to the cat.
Even granting that cats can be sustained on a diet of substances derived entirely by plants, cats can’t actually be vegan. Veganism is a philosophy of what it means to be a person and how humans should live, which cats don’t really have the brain structure to do. Even if you ignore that fact, cats are (I’m saying this as someone who loves cats) psychopathic little murderers; no matter how well-fed a cat is, it will still instinctively kill prey animals. Cats on the hunt will sometimes kill something to eat, see a new bit of prey, abandon their old kill, and hunt the new thing. Cats cannot be vegan.
Cats cannot be vegan since veganism is a moral philosophy and not a diet, but it has been well established that cats can thrive on a plant based diet supplemented with synthetic taurine, like the taurine found in popular Monster products.
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?
![[Meme] Maybe the discussion will be different this time compared to the ten others? (Edit: obligate, not mandate)](https://i.imgflip.com/920tpl.jpg){kind=link}