I think we’ve had enough of the vegan cat food argument on Lemmy.world at this point.
Isn’t it a rule if they stop acting superior they lose their vegan card and superpowers?
My biggest gripe with vegan communities is that a lot of them have an “All or Nothing” mentality, going fully vegan is a luxury not everyone can afford, and yet I find mainly malice when trying to talk about reducing ones own reliance on meat and other animal products in online communities.
And veganism, if taken to the “no suffering of sentient beings” full extreme, forbids buying things (not just food) produced by slavery. And those things, especially electronics and clothes, are not financially viable for most to be bought without any slavery involved in any step whatsoever.
Vegan diets are popular in third world countries because they’re considerably cheaper. Meat is cheap in western countries because it’s very often subsidized by governments. Meat consumption by wealth proves eating animals is a luxury.
Also veganism mantras always have “as far as is practicable”. I bought a Samsung phone because Fairphones don’t work here in Australia.
Save animals and switch to orphan-meat
your oxford study doesn’t account for anyone who gets free or subsidized meat, or who catches, raises, or hunts their own. so it excludes basically all of the working poor, which is basically everyone.
or who catches, raises, or hunts their own.
How does catching, raising, or hunting meat compare to planting or gathering their own plant-based food?
Or how does ‘free or subsidized meat’ compare with free or subsidized plant based food?
How does catching, raising, or hunting meat compare to planting or gathering their own plant-based food?
as the deer spends all year gathering nutrients, and they can spend one morning gathering the deer, it seems to me it’s highly effective.
Lol, ok so you’re including labor cost?
A couple years of a dear ‘gathering nutrients’, vs a summer of cultivating a garden and harvesting? Or do I need to include the energy expenditure (energy ingested by the dear minus energy lost to biological processes, vs solar energy collected minus energy expended on building plant mass and energy expended in harvest)?
I was really just pointing out the absurdity of your complaint about the study but you’re making this into a fun little digression.
it costs us almost nothing to take down a deer. it costs us a great deal to raise a garden.
Costs nothing to harvest a plant, too.
Costs a great deal to own a gun and ammunition, a truck to haul, tools and labor to clean and butcher, and more to store and prepare it. To speak nothing of the labor of the dear to produce the biomass.
Lol we can keep going with this if you want, it’s pretty fun.
Most vegans would allow an exception for certain lifestyles. People hunting for their homestead aren’t going to cause a global issue like is currently happening.
Ideally we wouldnt hunt at all but thats like some sort of futuristic goal. Noones going to tell you to starve your family to appease veganism, thats not the point.
The point is to reduce suffering and abuse wherever possible. Sometimes its not possible.
People hunting for their homestead aren’t going to cause a global issue like is currently happening.
that’s not what the vegan society says about animal exploitation.
if it’s free, then throwing it out and acquiring plants is more expensive.
If it’s free then throwing it out costs nothing though, right? Or are you talking about the cost of the state subsidy?
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to the state to subsidize a plant-based diet instead?
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to the state to subsidize a plant-based diet instead?
regardless of what would be a good decision for the state, the oxford paper doesn’t acknowledge the material conditions of most people.
If it’s free then throwing it out costs nothing though, right?
but replacing it would cost something. throwing away perfectly good food isn’t something most people think is a moral good.
Unsolicited advice: Your goal is to do no more or less than the best you can. If you’re doing that, no one got shit on you.
Which is precisely why they will get along with the tankies so well. Both treat the very idea of nuance as an existential threat to the point where everything much be driven by the most extreme degree of moral panic or nothing at all.
I still don’t know what tankies are and Im too afraid to ask.
“We taught a lion to eat Tofu”
I mean what a fucking mountain to die on. Bravo to all involved this has been quite entertaining.
Isn’t this something that the fediverse was explicitly designed to support?
We’re making fun of them for making use of one of the foundational features of the platform?If they don’t like it there, they can move again. And again. Or host their own instance.
Idk what this creepy vicarious butthurt is about, or why it has become so popular.
Sure you can ally yourself with the CCP and that might be totally legal (if they collect any personal data and send it overseas to China then that would be breaking the law but it’s unlikely) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t frowned upon.
That’s a stretch, but even assuming it’s true, why do you care enough about their community to frown upon it?
I have opinions on a lot of things that don’t effect me at all. Palestinian genocide, Uighurs in sweatshops, child labor laws in other states, homeless people being harassed, the socioeconomic shift of Hong Kong losing independent legal rights.
I can respect their freedom to ally themselves to people who wish them direct harm, but I also have the freedom to express my disappointment in them.
Circle jerking against vegans is a pasttime of the Internet denizens
Yeah, but it’s a pretty pathetic passtime. At least find a good reason, rather than doing literally the thing you want them to do.
Like, insulting them for leaving is just as bad as them crying that their toxic behavior scares people away. It makes no sense.
I mean this kind of a perfect example of doing the thing where you blow shit up over an extremely pedantic issue which is at best tangentially related to the core ethic, specifically because you view nuance itself as a threat. As far as purity tests dissolving into self parody, I’m not sure there’s a better example for veganism.
And I say this as a person who otherwise sympathizes with vegans, but often finds them insufferable. Self awareness is the vaccine to self parody.
this reads like cope.
Because it is
Do you just not believe vegan cats exist?
Supposedly they’d die right? Not live long healthy lives? Or live longer than cats on a standard diet?
Pretty much, yeah. And I’m not convinced by your news article either as the study described relies on the reporting of pet-owners. Vegan cat owners forcing such a diet on their pet aren’t exactly people I trust to be 100% honest about the wellness of said cat.
That’s the problem, just because they don’t immediately drop dead doesn’t make the diets any better for them.
Like a family camping trip, classic fun. Pitch a tent, start a fire, roast some vegans and sing kumbaya
It’s just disguised metadrama. They joined the instances this instance doesn’t like.
And so they’re moving, and somehow y’all are… Upset about it??? Make it make sense
I don’t see anyone upset about it.
Making fun of them, yes. But not upset.Making fun of them for doing what you want?
Or do you want them to stay?We’re making fun of them for getting forced out. We’re saying “good riddance”. Nobody is sad that the vegans are leaving, that community is so malicious that most people are cheering on their departure.
You’re the one that seems upset here. You seem hurt by our celebration. If you want, you can always follow the vegans to the cesspit they’re moving to in solidarity.
Treating vegans like the enemy because you do not understand them. Why is it so hard to critically think about why the vegans are so committed to their cause?
Nobody but toxic people like other toxic people. You’re not above anyone, you’re just toxic.
How do you come to either of those conclusions?
They’re leaving.
Y’all are making fun of them for leaving.If you want them to leave, as people often told them to do, why are you making fun of them for it? Why do you care where they go?
If you don’t want them to leave, why are you being mean to them?
With some people you cant win with them no matter what you do.
That’s not why people make fun of them.
Some people are not mature enough to handle the vegan perspective.
Yes, this is a feature of the fediverse, and we’re celebrating it here.
When shitty toxic communities create issues for the wider Lemmyverse, instance admins can lay down some ultimatums.
On the toxic community’s instance, the instance’s admins can demand that the toxic community correct their behavior, or the community and its offending users will get banned.
On other instances, offending communities can be blocked, and if users are regularly misbehaving, instance admins can pressure each other to enforce basic community conduct, or face defederation.
Once a community is given an ultimatum, they can either change their behavior to meet the expectations of the wider Lemmyverse, or they can find an instance that will allow their behavior.
If they choose to migrate to another instance, it will likely be a more extremist instance with poor moderation that has been significantly defederated. They have to exist within that narrow network of fringe instances now, giving them significantly less reach to harass or spread disinfo or whatever got them booted from the last place they called home.
And us users play a central role here. When we see communities doing harm, whether they are endorsing fascism, or pedophilia, or animal abuse, we need to stay “not here you don’t” and demand that action be taken.
When those communities end up migrating to some fringe instance full of dipshits, we need to applaud the mods and admins that sent them there, and let them know that their hard work was appreciated.
Federation works. Every fringe community in exile is proof of that. This is all one big community effort, so we can’t stay silent about what’s happening and expect that it all gets taken care of behind the scenes.
If they choose to migrate to another instance, it will likely be a more extremist instance with poor moderation that has been significantly defederated.
In theory this is how it should work, but in practice the toxic people tend to move to general purpose more laissez-faire places like .world or .ml, which makes de-federating and cutting off 30% of all users a difficult decision for anyone trying to have a community.
The answer is less centralization, but that can’t be forced. beehaw.org (for example) made the decision to cut off .world and they are better for it. But they are a large-ish instance in their own right.
So if you dont agree with someone they are an extremist, got it.
You are aware vegan cats exist right? Like its already a thing, and its being studied.
Y’all are so confidently wrong about stuff its crazy, and then y’all pat yourselves in the back for all grouping up and agreeing together.
Just because a lot of people are on one side of a position does not make it the right position, you must be aware there is more to think about right?
I didn’t say extremist I said toxic but really anyone who’s poorly socialized will go where they’re allowed, which in Lemmy terms means general catch-all instances with loose moderation like .world and .ml.
One study estimated 1% of cat owners feed their cat a vegan diet. Why do you think that might be? Are they all extremist animal abusers? Or is it possible you had an assumption that turned out to be wrong and now don’t know how to reconcile?
One study estimated
ok, you already lost me
Yes, if you are not feeding your pet a proper diet and are allowing it to suffer, you are an animal abuser.
Nah, eating and using animals is the extremist way of doing things.
Yes and no. The theory is that each instance is supposed to be more specialized, kind of like the old BBS that used to be rampant on the internet. If you are moving to an instance just because people disagree with you instead to have more discussion over a specific topic that is not really in line with the purpose of the fediverse.
Hexbear’s largest and most site-threatening drama was over its vegan comm (and I think the mods of Reddit’s vegancirclejerk?). It ended with the site requiring content warnings on all pictures of meat.
But you know what? They were right. Vegans are basically right about everything, and the reason me and my fellow omnis get our jimmies so rustled by them is because we fucking know they’re right.
casual drive-by meme;
I mean, they are vegans. Their brains withered long ago.
I mean, leaving .world is a pretty fair response. That community is full of insufferable idiots, but an admin overrode their moderating decisions, and then the admin team made up rules to retroactively justify their decision. That’s pretty egregious.
I’m no fan of Lemmy.world but I’m even less of a fan of dead cats.
What if we raise them in a factory farm and eat them instead? Don’t worry though. We will force feed them a carnivore diet in their tiny cages
I agree entirely. Let’s end the factory farming of cats.
Bruh. This is why I don’t like folks from vegan communities. So full of misinformation and vitriol regarding farming practices. Dead, malnourished and diseased cattle are worthless to a farmer, so they intentionally don’t keep them in conditions like these crazies describe.
That said I am trying to cut down on my meat consumption because meat production is more climate intensive than vegetables, and my diet is not as vegetable-heavy as it should be. But you folks make it so hard to feel good about making positive changes like that
because they challenge your biases you dont like them. classic
They literally do though? Have you ever seen a chicken farm? Or a mink farm? Or dozens of different examples of factory farming?
A few dead animals don’t matter if you can fit in 20x the amount of chickens in the same space
Not a mink farm but I’ve been to cow, goat, sheep, pig and chicken farms. You know what you get with 20x the herd in the same space? 200x the disease risk and 20x the loss when you have to cull the entire herd because the USDA started investigating why your cattle tested positive for [insert nastiness here]. Sick cattle are a great way to lose the farm that’s been in the family for generations. Healthy cattle are how you give your kids the option to choose to continue farming
What is your intent when replying like this? Did you intend to have a conversation and a sharing of views? Is it just about mocking the hypocrisy what you assume my views to be?
Yeah, to be clear, you should not feed your cat a Vegan diet. Cats are obligate carnivores. Synthetic Taurine has made vegan catfood somewhat more viable, but cats don’t just need Taurine from prey. They need several vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids from animal protein to survive. Beyond that, their digestive tract isn’t very efficient at digesting plant matter, so even if these foods have the nutritional value they need, they might not be absorbing it. Also, a lot of these products seem to be made from grains and other carb heavy products, and cats need a very low carb, high protein diet. If you want to completely divest from the meat industry, you simply shouldn’t own a cat.
That being said, Vegan catfood products are on the market, so whether or not they are good for cats, they have been approved by several regulating bodies. You can claim that they’re unsafe (I certainly do), but having an admin nuke a comment section for claiming otherwise is a huge overreaction. It would be like going into a vape community and banning accounts that claimed vaping is safer than smoking; it probably isn’t, but I don’t need admins deciding who gets to have discourse about that.
Finally, I’m also not a fan of dead cats, but if you’re dumb enough to take veterinary advice from an internet vegan group, you’re probably too dumb to keep a cat alive anyway.
Vegan catfood products are on the market, so whether or not they are good for cats, they have been approved by several regulating bodies
Yeah, that’s not how it works. Especially in countries with extreme regulatory capture like the US.
Unless a product has text that says in a very specifically worded way that it’s been tested and approved by a relevant regulatory body, it hasn’t.
The fact that something hasn’t been taken off the market YET does not necessarily mean that it’s been approved. Especially not when you’re dealing with politically volatile stuff that could lead to lengthy public lawsuits sapping the resources of the already chronically underfunded and understaffed agencies.
If it’s vegan food for obligate carnivores, it MIGHT technically be “safe” (as in won’t be outright lethal), but for the reasons you yourself mentioned, it’s likely to significantly decrease the animal’s enjoyment of life at best and more likely to be downright torturous.
It would be like going into a vape community and banning accounts that claimed vaping is safer than smoking
Except for the fact that those accounts would be absolutely right and have reams of scientific evidence from the world’s foremost experts in related fields to back up their claims. Unlike the people abusing cats in the name of not abusing animals.
it probably isn’t
It is. It’s not even anywhere near the next city over from the neighborhood of close.
but I don’t need admins deciding who gets to have discourse about that
Except limiting the spread of dangerous misinformation, such as common myths that are keeping smokers away from one of if not THE most effective smoking cessation tool, is a big part of what admins are FOR.
if you’re dumb enough to take veterinary advice from an internet vegan group, you’re probably too dumb to keep a cat alive anyway
Yeah…that’s not a valid argument either. A lot of vegans avoid getting a cat because they’re too overzealous in their veganism to even want carnivorous animals to eat meat.
The Venn diagram of people vegan enough to love carnivores but refuse to give them meat and people who would trust a vegan online echo chamber more than competent veterinarians is a circle within a bigger circle.
Well, various vegan catfoods have been approved for use in not only the U.S. but also the E.U., but your point about regulatory capture is fair. Unfortunately, it’s undercut by your support for vaping, a nicotine product brought to market with an insane lack of oversight. Ironically, most of what you’re complaining about with the cat food is exactly what makes vaping so dangerous. We don’t have as much research or long-term studies on the effects of vaping to say it’s as dangerous as smoking, but we know that they contain propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, which are toxic to cells, aldehydes, which are associated with lung disease and heart disease, acrolein, which can cause COPD, asthma and lung cancer, as well as various heavy metals. I’m pretty sure that a lot more people will die of vaping than cats will die of veganism. That being said, I don’t think people who support vaping should be removed from lemmy for using a product that’s probably unsafe, and and it’s not the job of admins or moderators to stop people from taking bad health advice from strangers on the internet.
In the UK the NHS is advocating for vaping as a way to stop smoking, and it works. Also, i don’t know where you get your information about VG and PG (especially regarding their toxicity), but i am more than sure that your information is outdated/obsolete by now.
A large part of your cells walls are made out of vegetable glycerin. The LD50 for rats is about 12g/kg body weight (mice 8g/kg) when ingested (so about 1kg for a 100kg human), and the seen adverse effects when inhaling were minimal and only visible in hourlong exposures at the highest tested concentration.
Propylene Glycol has an even higher LD50 in rodents (20 GRAMS/kg b.w.) and is in use in every theatre in the world for fog and smoke effects (in HUGE volumes in contrast to vaping - i vape a lot and am somwhere between 5-10ml VG/PG 1:1 per day) for ages now, and there would have been found a correlation between stage workers and lung cancer by now. It’s widely used in the agricultural sector as a feed additive in pretty large quantities too.
you get acrolein when the e-cigarette overheats. modern devices should not even really do this anymore. The heavy metals are a hypothesis i heard in the beginning and for which i haven’t seen any source in the last 5 years. At least if you aren’t overheating your NI80 coils on purpose to a dull red glow. all my homies use SS316 for smooth automatic temperature control :-)
I’m with you regarding the aroma additives (which i assume you meant as source for aldehydes); not many of those have been tested regarding inhalation (except for aromatherapy probably), and they might prove to be detrimental. i also believe that if i had kept my pack or two a day hobby for much longer, it would have had a real chance of killing me. i am also advocating that this stuff should be 18+ - by that age the whole “peer pressure” thing that led to me starting smoking with 14 should be mostly over.
in the end, the most important part is: i choose to use e-cigarettes since it’s harm reduction in comparison to smoking (and nothing else worked for me), and i know that it would be healthier not to do it. cats don’t have much choice regarding their food, especially when combined with an religiously motivated owner.
I feel like nobody is approaching this from a consent aspect either. If someone offers their cat an array of cat food options and makes an actual honest attempt to determine a long term preference and the cat legitimately prefers the vegan cat food, then that’s way less problematic than saying “you will eat this weird food or you will starve.”
The forced veganism thing just feels a lot like saying “studies show that a human can technically survive on roaches and rat feces as long as they get a vitamin C supplement.”
I just wanted to add: the reason why most carnivores go for the digestive tract first when eating their prey is that they eat the predigested plant matter with the entrails, making those nutrients much more readily available to them.
It’s a shame; i’m sure there are vegans feeding their cats this way, and when those animals lose muscle mass quickly, the first thing that gets really damaged by that are their kidneys - and this does normally only get noticed shortly before the cat is going to die. And it’s an ugly death. I’ve had a young cat which had nearly dead kidneys when we got her, and it’s pure torture for them - we tried everything we could, but there’s not much to be done after they show symptoms. That one “study” that other poster is throwing around with the owner-reported feedback regarding the health of their cats has actual negative worth.
- Adding animal abuse to their TOS was a good move. I’m surprised it wasn’t already there.
- Encouraging people to feed a cat a vegan diet is a call to abuse a cat through deliberate malnourishment.
- Mods on c/vegan were directly calling for animal abuse, and censoring anyone countering them.
I stand with the admins on this. Zero sympathy for animal abusers.
leaving .world is a pretty fair response
Okay, .world account…
So you are cool if we just feed prisoners vitamin fortified gruel since they can technically survive on it?
I mean a lot of people are feeding there cats cheap dry kibble that has almost no resemblance to the meat it was rendered from. If your argument is that it’s abuse if you aren’t feeding your cat what it wants then there’s a lot of cat abusers out there.
I will happily argue that this is a form of animal abuse. People buying cheap Wal Mart kibble are shitty.
I mean we do already with nutraloaf. But lets stay on the topic at hand.
So vegan diets are just “salads, bugs, grass and gruel” whenever it suits your argument for the moment.
I absolutely abhor the idea of nutraloaf. It’s the same modernist bullshit which got us eugenics.
If you actually give your cat a real option and they choose the vegan food, that is fine with me.
There are many plant-based recipes that are tasty out there, cats would enjoy the vegan food if its made right.
Its their nature in the wild to choose meat because its what sustained them for so long in the past.
- Agreed, except when it’s being done to retroactively justify your actions.
- I think it’s a very bad idea to feed a cat a Vegan diet, but there are vegan products being sold on the market, and if you want to feed your cat one of these products, you should discuss them with a vet or other qualified professional. Regular dry food contains way more carbohydrates than cats are meant to have in their diet, which can lead to obesity and diabetes in cats. Are people who feed their cats dry food animal abusers? Should the Lemmy admins start policing the use of dry food?
- The mods of c/vegan were trying to assert their ability to moderate their own sub as they saw fit in the face of a massive overreach from the admin. I think they’re the most insufferable community I’ve seen on this instance, but they should have the right to moderate their own community.
And yes, I’m on .world, but very little of my identity is tired up in my lemmy instance, and I’m certainly not going to bat for the .world admins when they do something crazy.
And yes, I’m on .world, but very little of my identity is tired up in my lemmy instance, and I’m certainly not going to bat for the .world admins when they do something crazy.
Just please make an alt account if you intend on cresting any communities.
If thats true then everyone should probably start leaving .world. If they cant even behave themselves with something as simple as veganism, then you cant trust them to not powertrip with actually controversial political issues.
you cant trust them to not powertrip with actually controversial political issues.
I mean they “preemptively defederated hexbear as a last resort” for fear they might discuss politics, so that ship has sailed.
Shush tankie.
Maybe, but this seems like a problem that’s bigger than a single instance. A few months back someone came with some pretty good receipts showing .ml admins going after people for having some very fair and moderate criticisms of China. Seems like most instances either have power tripping mods or are too small to have much activity.
The issues with dot ml and dot world are hardly comparable. I’ve had my concerns with some of the world admin actions (flip-flopping, lack of communication) but I do believe they are trying in good faith. I’m still happy to be registered and to make my communities elsewhere but for now I don’t see them as being nearly as egregious as ml.
ITT: circlejerking.
Lemmy dot world definitely doesn’t circlejerk, no siree.
.world is the biggest circlejerk instance of all.
Wish I knew this a little sooner
What’s keeping you?
I have been trying to make an account on a fediverse instance for so long and it not working each time I made an account. It finally decided to work recently when I made this account
If you plan on switching instances, sh.itjust.works and slrpnk.net are pretty good. I wouldn’t really recommend lemmy.ml or hexbear.net since they’re really not better than lemmy.world.
db0 also seems pretty well run.
I honestly don’t understand the big issue with hexbear. They seem to be quite progressive, and I’ve yet to have a bad interaction with anyone from that instance. Maybe I just got lucky though. Anecdotes aren’t data, after all.
Yeah, db0 was also pretty good in my experience.
Not sure, but I do remember seeing hexbear.net on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works quite a few times. They seem to have the same moderation problems lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml have.
I wouldn’t really recommend lemmy.ml or hexbear.net since they’re really not better than lemmy.world.
That’s a very polite way to say what everybody thinks.
Yup.
You guys 🥹
Look the beans were great, but our own bender-hookers-and-blow meme. You shouldn’t have ☺️❤️❤️❤️
what - the only 5 active people in there got tired of getting bullied or something lmao
