Humans can be vegan because we’re omnivores. Meat isn’t the only source we need to get our nutrition. Our bodies are fantastic at pulling nutrients from different food sources.
Cats and dogs are not. They are carnivores. Their bodies cannot adequately process the nutrition from non-meat sources.
Humans can also take supplements for whatever nutrients we’re missing. It’s much harder to get an animal to take them, especially when you’re looking at how many would be required on a vegan diet.
Finally, ask any vet what foods to avoid and they will tell you that you don’t want to ever give your animal those small-batch/boutique foods. They are almost never nutritionally complete since they’re designed to appear appealing to the humans, not the animals. They also often aren’t produced in a clean food-safe environment.
Humans are good at pulling nutrients from all sorts of sources but those sources have to actually contain the nutrients in the first place, we don’t have some magic ability to just eat one thing with no supplementation and get all our nutrients.
Dogs are omnivores.
Supplements are already in the livestock (that we feed the cats) feed and animal based cat food. Yes it’s harder to get most cats to take a pill than a human adult, but that really isn’t necessary it can just be put in the food itself, and it is.
I mean you’re the one coming into a thread in a different community getting snarky with multiple different people who are all being pretty level headed so
Let’s just say you’re right, it’s perfectly possible and healthy for the cat.
Does that make it ethical to force a carnivorous hunter animal on a vegan diet? Are you going to force it to stay inside to limit the possibility for it to catch mice & birds just to be sure?
Just beyond the physical possibility, how ethical is it to force our choices onto our pets?
Most people I’ve talked to, which is mostly nonvegans, think it is unethical to let cats outside because they will kill wild animals. This is a more hypocritical stance than the reverse (a vegan who lets their cat outside) if you understand veganism.
You’re also throwing around the word forced. People force choices on their pets, children, and even fellow adults all the time, but there are different levels of force. Putting down food for a cat that gladly eats it is a far cry away from shoving something down their throat or leaving it out until they have no choice but to eat it. I’d argue that it’s often very appropriate to make food choices for a cat you live with, if a cat begs for some lasagna or a donut you probably shouldn’t give it to them.
Edit:
Also when people talk about forcing cats onto a vegan diet you have to realize the alternative is forcing livestock to suffer serious trauma for their entire life and then die. It’s not hard to see that one of these is a more serious abuse of our power over other animals.
What do you mean by forcing being the wrong word? Do you give the cat a bowl of meat and a bowl of vegan alternative for a month, and then see what the cat chooses? That would not be forcing imo. But i doubt that’s happening anywhere.
We already force our cats to eat the canned food and dry kibble we provide them. The standard cat diet is just not healthy to start with, which is what opens the conversation to “what food would make my cat healthy” and then if you are already there, its not much of a stretch to consider ALL types of foods so that we are sure to find the best result.
If vegan food for cats is possible without reducing the cats quality of life, then its worth trying. Most cats just plain dont like the vegan food though, and no vegan would force their CST to be unhappy just to make them vegan.
The whole point is to improve the cats life, not to force our morals on them. If it was possible for your cat to live 25% longer on a vegan diet, would it be abusive not to even consider it? (Not saying that’s a settled fact, its a thought exercise).
The premise is what matters, which is that you like to eat meat. Because of this, let’s say a chicken company has decided they will kill a chicken so that you can buy it. Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
You could kill it yourself, but like you said, you are no murderer, so you pay a company to do it for you and then you get to feel like you aren’t a murderer. What a deal!
People dont eat meat because companies produce it, companies produce it because people eat it. Therefore the blame lies with those that eat it, which also means the best way to reduce animal deaths is to stop eating meat so that companies will produce less of it.
Eventually, they might stop producing it at any meaningful scale altogether, once enough people reduce or stop their consumption of meat.
I’m sort of confused what you think buying a product from a company means? The price they charge is to cover all of the costs they spent to produce it plus a profit. You are paying a company to make whatever good you buy from them by purchasing the item, they’ve just premade it for convenience. They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don’t. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
Its a relationship essentially and I dont think its possible to assign responsibility to a single side of the relationship. Ultimately its both the companies fault for offering to supply it, and the customers fault for offering to buy it.
Its very similar to why its so hard to decide who to blame when looking at a drug dealer selling to a drug addict. The answer is they are two sides of the same coin, and neither would exist without the other.
I understand you want proof but I think all I can offer is philosophy or whatever we want to call it. This whole concept is important to how I make decisions and I will stand by it until someone can reason me out of it.
Unfortunately I’m having a lot of trouble following the logic of your position. For me it falls apart as soon as I try to think a few steps past the immediate action of buying pre packaged meet in a store, and what those actions lead to.
Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
people’s actions are not caused by incentives. they are caused by our will. i don’t decide for others whether to kill chickens. tehy decide for themselves.
Peoples actions are caused by rewards. When you do something and are rewarded either externally (other people, nature, etc.) or internally (self-reward) which then causes you to want to repeat the actions. Its cyclical, and you can’t have the action without the reward or the system breaks and the action stops being rewarded. If you do this cycle long enough, you will learn a habit that no longer requires the type of reward to sustain.
You buy meat, reward company with money, company is happy and decides to do it again, rinse and repeat. You can’t have one without the other so the company is just as responsible for selling as you are for buying. Either of you could break the cycle but neither wants to.
Thats why vegans try to show a good example and share their reasoning and discuss things, because this is what breaks harmful cycles and habits.
Yes I also understand not every country is in a position to be plant based, its a transition that takes time. The numbers I’m most interested in seeing is percentage of the population that is vegan and whether that percentage goes up or not.
Yeah, try that one in court. No your honor, i didn’t pay for the murder, i paid for someone who paid for someone to commit the murder. I’m obviously innocent!
It’s a plain stupid argument to try and make, and it makes no sense. And i’m not even vegan, i just recognize that yes, a part of the money i pay for meat goes to who kills it, so i pay for someone to kill animals for me so i can eat them. That’s how the world works, and denying that is just ridiculous.
your analogy doesn’t reflect the reality at all. a more apt analogy would be that someone paid to have their grandfather murdered, and later had an estate sale. at that estate sale, if i buy a watch, am i responsible for murder? no.
your version of the story leaves out some important facts like it doesn’t matter whether you put it in your cart because it’s already dead, and the person who killed it was already paid by somebody who wasn’t you.
That is pretty irrelevant. You purchasing the product signals a certain demand for it, that demand will help determine how much product is requested in the future, there is a cascading effect all the way up the supply chain. Sure an additional chicken might not be bred just because you purchased a chicken, it’s way more abstract than that. Maybe if a hundred more chickens are bought then a hundred more chickens will be bred as replacements plus extra to account for growth and failed product (dead or sick chickens). And if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken. Do you think if nobody purchased chickens that they would just keep stocking the shelves?
Yes increasing awareness amongst our social groups about the benefits of vegan diets and the detriments of meat based diets. Most people want to be healthy.
The meat industry has a large effect on pollution a well, and affects the environment in many ways in water and on land.
Everyone’s not vegan until they decide to be, I was a meat eat for 30 years before I made the decision, I understand its not easy or quick.
Some people just need to live in proximity with a vegan so they can learn by watching. The general public still has a lot of animosity towards vegans and especially vegan activists (and environmental activists as well, when they bring up meat). Sort of similar to how proximity dispels racism in a lot of ways.
That’s not important. I was illustrating that clearly if nobody ate chicken nobody would harvest chickens for food. Unless you think that the same amount of chickens will be harvested until the very last human gives up chicken then you have to acknowledge that the individual consumer does make a difference.
So while you are eating said chicken, you are thinking “I’m not responsible for what happened to this bird?”
Is it the same as roadkill to you? Like it just so happened to be dead and nearby?
How about this: if person A murders person B, and then sells the meat to person C to consume, are both persons A and C responsible for murder or just A? What if person C is in the room when person B is murdered and butchered, does that change the answer? What if person C lives in another country and the meat is shipped to them, any change then?
I’d ask you to honestly consider that instead of discounting it for replacing animals with humans.
If you don’t eat chicken nobody is going to swoop in and eat all the chicken you don’t eat. However if a farmer or farming corporation decides to stop harvesting chickens then it’s almost certain some entity will swoop in to replace them in the market. So acting like the consumer here is not one of the if not the most important part in this causal chain is just naive.
if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken.
The BEHAVIOR of a very small subset of vegans unfortunately causes a small but ridiculously vocal subset of non-vegans to tar all vegans with the same brush.
Since volume equals truth for a not insignificant number of people in the Internet, far too many people don’t stop to separate behavior choices from professed beliefs and that’s how we get where we are now, I unfortunately.
The world would be a better place if people stopped automatically associating and assuming causation and instead treated bad behavior as just that.
Like the words, “woke” and, “terf” the word, “carnist” identifies the non-ironic user as an ideological extremist. It isn’t vegans who get a lot of hate, it is vegan extremists. I love my vegan friends and bend over backwards to accommodate them. People who use the word, “carnist” can choke on a horse dick.
Definitions made up by vegan extremists. Carnist, corpse munched, and blood mouth, sneered through clenched teeth are a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with a lunatic extremist.
“Carnist” was co-opted by vegan extremists and is sneered through clenched teeth as an slur at anyone who doesn’t agree with them by those extremists just as “woke” and “progressive” are sneered by right wing extremists at anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the Project 2025 vision of a Handmaid’s Tale version of the United States, “terf” is sneered by trans extremists at anyone who doesn’t agree that you can magically change your sex by changing your gender, and the n-word has been sneered by racist extremists for centuries at anyone they see as racially impure.
Extremists are all the same.
So, show me “corpse muncher” and “blood mouth” or we’re done here
I really don’t think it’s hate, in the classic sense. I think most of it is sort of a hamarotic response that’s made possible by the fact that these forums show up in everybody’s feed, and given that vegans typically have negative views on the eating practices of the rest of the world, can be seen referring to those people as they do in private. As you seem to be insinuating, it feels-bad-man to have your lifestyle casually attacked, and nearly always elicits retaliation because humans.
I feel like a lot of it is a matter of terminology. For instance, using the word “omnivore” instead of “carnist”, or “Bovine Matchmaker”, instead of “Animal Rapist”.
All of this. I just blocked the sub. It’s not in my interest to raise my blood pressure over what a bunch of chuckle fucks think of my choices. It’s fucking weird the pejoratives they invent. Carnist? That’s cool, like an artist. Whatever. They can live in their world and I’ll stay out of it. They aren’t affecting me.
We shouldn’t tone down our language because others might be offended by it. “Bovine matchmaker” just isn’t the reality of what artificial insemination is.
The /c/vegan mods in turn banned the Admin from the community because it was obvious there was no objective basis to these removals. The admin in turn got themselves unbanned and banned the mods.
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So, someone sane.
If you think a cat can be vegan, please never own a cat.
Agreed.
Humans can be vegan because we’re omnivores. Meat isn’t the only source we need to get our nutrition. Our bodies are fantastic at pulling nutrients from different food sources.
Cats and dogs are not. They are carnivores. Their bodies cannot adequately process the nutrition from non-meat sources.
Humans can also take supplements for whatever nutrients we’re missing. It’s much harder to get an animal to take them, especially when you’re looking at how many would be required on a vegan diet.
Finally, ask any vet what foods to avoid and they will tell you that you don’t want to ever give your animal those small-batch/boutique foods. They are almost never nutritionally complete since they’re designed to appear appealing to the humans, not the animals. They also often aren’t produced in a clean food-safe environment.
Humans are good at pulling nutrients from all sorts of sources but those sources have to actually contain the nutrients in the first place, we don’t have some magic ability to just eat one thing with no supplementation and get all our nutrients.
Dogs are omnivores.
Supplements are already in the livestock (that we feed the cats) feed and animal based cat food. Yes it’s harder to get most cats to take a pill than a human adult, but that really isn’t necessary it can just be put in the food itself, and it is.
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I mean you’re the one coming into a thread in a different community getting snarky with multiple different people who are all being pretty level headed so
Let’s just say you’re right, it’s perfectly possible and healthy for the cat.
Does that make it ethical to force a carnivorous hunter animal on a vegan diet? Are you going to force it to stay inside to limit the possibility for it to catch mice & birds just to be sure?
Just beyond the physical possibility, how ethical is it to force our choices onto our pets?
Most people I’ve talked to, which is mostly nonvegans, think it is unethical to let cats outside because they will kill wild animals. This is a more hypocritical stance than the reverse (a vegan who lets their cat outside) if you understand veganism.
You’re also throwing around the word forced. People force choices on their pets, children, and even fellow adults all the time, but there are different levels of force. Putting down food for a cat that gladly eats it is a far cry away from shoving something down their throat or leaving it out until they have no choice but to eat it. I’d argue that it’s often very appropriate to make food choices for a cat you live with, if a cat begs for some lasagna or a donut you probably shouldn’t give it to them.
Edit: Also when people talk about forcing cats onto a vegan diet you have to realize the alternative is forcing livestock to suffer serious trauma for their entire life and then die. It’s not hard to see that one of these is a more serious abuse of our power over other animals.
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What do you mean by forcing being the wrong word? Do you give the cat a bowl of meat and a bowl of vegan alternative for a month, and then see what the cat chooses? That would not be forcing imo. But i doubt that’s happening anywhere.
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You people are unhinged.
Ok vegan
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Ok vegan
no one pays for murder
Sometimes people pay for murder.
most people don’t.
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everything ive said is true
no one does that
Ok, i get it, it’s fun to hate on the vegan, but he’s right and you’re not.
If you buy meat somewhere part of the price is you paying for the person that killed it. That’s obvious right?
Of course in relation to the cat, even if there’s a healthy vegan diet possible, he’s wrong imo. Why force our choices onto pets?
We already force our cats to eat the canned food and dry kibble we provide them. The standard cat diet is just not healthy to start with, which is what opens the conversation to “what food would make my cat healthy” and then if you are already there, its not much of a stretch to consider ALL types of foods so that we are sure to find the best result.
If vegan food for cats is possible without reducing the cats quality of life, then its worth trying. Most cats just plain dont like the vegan food though, and no vegan would force their CST to be unhappy just to make them vegan.
The whole point is to improve the cats life, not to force our morals on them. If it was possible for your cat to live 25% longer on a vegan diet, would it be abusive not to even consider it? (Not saying that’s a settled fact, its a thought exercise).
no. that person is already paid and paid by somebody who is not me
The premise is what matters, which is that you like to eat meat. Because of this, let’s say a chicken company has decided they will kill a chicken so that you can buy it. Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
You could kill it yourself, but like you said, you are no murderer, so you pay a company to do it for you and then you get to feel like you aren’t a murderer. What a deal!
People dont eat meat because companies produce it, companies produce it because people eat it. Therefore the blame lies with those that eat it, which also means the best way to reduce animal deaths is to stop eating meat so that companies will produce less of it.
Eventually, they might stop producing it at any meaningful scale altogether, once enough people reduce or stop their consumption of meat.
i have never done that.
I’m sort of confused what you think buying a product from a company means? The price they charge is to cover all of the costs they spent to produce it plus a profit. You are paying a company to make whatever good you buy from them by purchasing the item, they’ve just premade it for convenience. They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don’t. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
Its a relationship essentially and I dont think its possible to assign responsibility to a single side of the relationship. Ultimately its both the companies fault for offering to supply it, and the customers fault for offering to buy it.
Its very similar to why its so hard to decide who to blame when looking at a drug dealer selling to a drug addict. The answer is they are two sides of the same coin, and neither would exist without the other.
I understand you want proof but I think all I can offer is philosophy or whatever we want to call it. This whole concept is important to how I make decisions and I will stand by it until someone can reason me out of it.
Unfortunately I’m having a lot of trouble following the logic of your position. For me it falls apart as soon as I try to think a few steps past the immediate action of buying pre packaged meet in a store, and what those actions lead to.
people’s actions are not caused by incentives. they are caused by our will. i don’t decide for others whether to kill chickens. tehy decide for themselves.
Peoples actions are caused by rewards. When you do something and are rewarded either externally (other people, nature, etc.) or internally (self-reward) which then causes you to want to repeat the actions. Its cyclical, and you can’t have the action without the reward or the system breaks and the action stops being rewarded. If you do this cycle long enough, you will learn a habit that no longer requires the type of reward to sustain.
You buy meat, reward company with money, company is happy and decides to do it again, rinse and repeat. You can’t have one without the other so the company is just as responsible for selling as you are for buying. Either of you could break the cycle but neither wants to.
Thats why vegans try to show a good example and share their reasoning and discuss things, because this is what breaks harmful cycles and habits.
i don’t know how you would go about trying to disprove this claim.
have you tried that?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
Yes I also understand not every country is in a position to be plant based, its a transition that takes time. The numbers I’m most interested in seeing is percentage of the population that is vegan and whether that percentage goes up or not.
Yeah, try that one in court. No your honor, i didn’t pay for the murder, i paid for someone who paid for someone to commit the murder. I’m obviously innocent!
It’s a plain stupid argument to try and make, and it makes no sense. And i’m not even vegan, i just recognize that yes, a part of the money i pay for meat goes to who kills it, so i pay for someone to kill animals for me so i can eat them. That’s how the world works, and denying that is just ridiculous.
i would be innocent. i had nothing to do with any of their decisions, and only much later did i pay anyone, but not the people responsible.
your analogy doesn’t reflect the reality at all. a more apt analogy would be that someone paid to have their grandfather murdered, and later had an estate sale. at that estate sale, if i buy a watch, am i responsible for murder? no.
it’s obvious you can’t suss it out, but the rest of us have had a pretty good conversation about it til you showed up.
no, it doesn’t. that person was already paid.
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your version of the story leaves out some important facts like it doesn’t matter whether you put it in your cart because it’s already dead, and the person who killed it was already paid by somebody who wasn’t you.
That is pretty irrelevant. You purchasing the product signals a certain demand for it, that demand will help determine how much product is requested in the future, there is a cascading effect all the way up the supply chain. Sure an additional chicken might not be bred just because you purchased a chicken, it’s way more abstract than that. Maybe if a hundred more chickens are bought then a hundred more chickens will be bred as replacements plus extra to account for growth and failed product (dead or sick chickens). And if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken. Do you think if nobody purchased chickens that they would just keep stocking the shelves?
do you have a plan to get no one to purchase chickens?
Yes increasing awareness amongst our social groups about the benefits of vegan diets and the detriments of meat based diets. Most people want to be healthy.
The meat industry has a large effect on pollution a well, and affects the environment in many ways in water and on land.
Everyone’s not vegan until they decide to be, I was a meat eat for 30 years before I made the decision, I understand its not easy or quick.
Some people just need to live in proximity with a vegan so they can learn by watching. The general public still has a lot of animosity towards vegans and especially vegan activists (and environmental activists as well, when they bring up meat). Sort of similar to how proximity dispels racism in a lot of ways.
That’s not important. I was illustrating that clearly if nobody ate chicken nobody would harvest chickens for food. Unless you think that the same amount of chickens will be harvested until the very last human gives up chicken then you have to acknowledge that the individual consumer does make a difference.
this is not causal. someone decides whether or how much of a product to purchase. they have free will. i am not responsible for their decision.
So while you are eating said chicken, you are thinking “I’m not responsible for what happened to this bird?”
Is it the same as roadkill to you? Like it just so happened to be dead and nearby?
How about this: if person A murders person B, and then sells the meat to person C to consume, are both persons A and C responsible for murder or just A? What if person C is in the room when person B is murdered and butchered, does that change the answer? What if person C lives in another country and the meat is shipped to them, any change then?
I’d ask you to honestly consider that instead of discounting it for replacing animals with humans.
If you don’t eat chicken nobody is going to swoop in and eat all the chicken you don’t eat. However if a farmer or farming corporation decides to stop harvesting chickens then it’s almost certain some entity will swoop in to replace them in the market. So acting like the consumer here is not one of the if not the most important part in this causal chain is just naive.
i’m not responsible for others decisions at all.
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this is handwaving, not evidence for your position
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do you have a plan to achieve this? I’ll help. let me know when I’m the last one.
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animals were killed for food long before money. there is no reason to think it will ever stop
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The BEHAVIOR of a very small subset of vegans unfortunately causes a small but ridiculously vocal subset of non-vegans to tar all vegans with the same brush.
Since volume equals truth for a not insignificant number of people in the Internet, far too many people don’t stop to separate behavior choices from professed beliefs and that’s how we get where we are now, I unfortunately.
The world would be a better place if people stopped automatically associating and assuming causation and instead treated bad behavior as just that.
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on lemmy?
Like the words, “woke” and, “terf” the word, “carnist” identifies the non-ironic user as an ideological extremist. It isn’t vegans who get a lot of hate, it is vegan extremists. I love my vegan friends and bend over backwards to accommodate them. People who use the word, “carnist” can choke on a horse dick.
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Definitions made up by vegan extremists. Carnist, corpse munched, and blood mouth, sneered through clenched teeth are a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with a lunatic extremist.
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Show me “corpse muncher” and “blood mouth”.
“Carnist” was co-opted by vegan extremists and is sneered through clenched teeth as an slur at anyone who doesn’t agree with them by those extremists just as “woke” and “progressive” are sneered by right wing extremists at anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the Project 2025 vision of a Handmaid’s Tale version of the United States, “terf” is sneered by trans extremists at anyone who doesn’t agree that you can magically change your sex by changing your gender, and the n-word has been sneered by racist extremists for centuries at anyone they see as racially impure.
Extremists are all the same.
So, show me “corpse muncher” and “blood mouth” or we’re done here
Do you have a problem with the word chud? Because you sure sound like one.
I only care if I respect the person saying it and their opinion. In your case, not in the slightest. Carry on.
I really don’t think it’s hate, in the classic sense. I think most of it is sort of a hamarotic response that’s made possible by the fact that these forums show up in everybody’s feed, and given that vegans typically have negative views on the eating practices of the rest of the world, can be seen referring to those people as they do in private. As you seem to be insinuating, it feels-bad-man to have your lifestyle casually attacked, and nearly always elicits retaliation because humans.
I feel like a lot of it is a matter of terminology. For instance, using the word “omnivore” instead of “carnist”, or “Bovine Matchmaker”, instead of “Animal Rapist”.
it’s not rape, it is a veterinary procedure
All of this. I just blocked the sub. It’s not in my interest to raise my blood pressure over what a bunch of chuckle fucks think of my choices. It’s fucking weird the pejoratives they invent. Carnist? That’s cool, like an artist. Whatever. They can live in their world and I’ll stay out of it. They aren’t affecting me.
We shouldn’t tone down our language because others might be offended by it. “Bovine matchmaker” just isn’t the reality of what artificial insemination is.
I agree with you, but/and you are making my point for me.
I’m not sure how I am?
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I’m going to skip a LOT of the trope level arguments here. How about this:
Do you believe that lions in captivity (whatever your feelings about lions in captivity are), should be fed a vegan diet?
I bet the cats being fed a vegan diet aren’t living that long.
They can live just fine, as long as attention is paid to them getting all the essential nutrients a growing cat needs, but like… Why would you?
What else did they expect?