I was only gone for a day or two...

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Some vegans decide all cats, like all other animals, should join their club, whether they want to or not. Deemed dubious practice by some but not impossible by others.
Admin loses mind, power trips.
You're caught up.
- You forget the community mods banning an admin and reinstating a bunch of deleted comments.
  
  The admins at c/vegan ban anyone who speaks inconvenient truth into their echo bunker. I am proudly banned for arguing for the ethical treatment of obligate carnivores (long before this latest explosion of misinformation and the promotion of animal abuse.)
  
  I just had a quick look over there, every post bar one in the last week is about vegan cat food.
  They're not taking this well.
  
  Before this the mods at c/vegan had iron fisted control over what ideas were acceptable in their echo bunker. They actively promoted pseudo-scientific propaganda that supported their self-assured ideological moral purity and banned anyone who question the misinformation or posted peer reviewed science that contradicted the misinformation. Their echo bunker has been blown open, their lies and ideological censorship are on full display, and like insects exposed when their rock is lifted they are scurrying around trying to find somewhere ideologically dark and safe to hide.
  
  Isn't that kind of the point of having open communities, so that you can decide what does and doesn't belong in your community without some centralized censor coming in and deciding what is acceptable in your community unless it's illegal or actively harmful?
  If you have definitive sources that vegan cat food with the appropriate taurine supplements aren't ok for normal healthy cats then you can make an argument that that's animal abuse, but otherwise you're just applying your own preconceptions to their community.
  
  This is why the hammer got lowered on the community. It isn't up to anyone to prove that vegan cat food is acceptable. Provide peer reviewed scientific studies published in reputable journals to demonstrate that it is.
  
  Why is the default that it isn't? I'm saying we shouldn't have an admin enforced default not force one or the other People give terrible advice regarding pet care, child rearing and everything else. Why is this any different? Should we ban all content with exotic pets like parrots or sugar gliders because they overwhelmingly do poorly in captivity?
  
  Because that's how science works? Cats are obligate carnivores. They require a diet of meat. If you are insisting that a diet without meat can satisfy the needs of an obligate carnivores then it is up to you to prove that it is with a large, well designed study that is published, peer reviewed, and repeatable.
  That is what the admin was saying. You can't use the claims in a book written by a vegan activist who was confirming his own bias as proof. That isn't proof. It isn't up to science to prove you wrong. It's up to you to prove you right.
  
  Ethical treatment would be not to own one in the first place.
  
  So the ethical thing is to send my dog into the wilds to die? Or have it turn into a stray dog gang with all the other dogs "ethical" people let go, and then kill them because they become a menace to society? Or is the ethical thing to let them eat us?
  
  If you want a real answer, ethically you should not have gotten a carnivore in the first place and reduce the demand for carnivore pets. After that it's just a math problem, how many factory farmed animals will that dog eat throughout it's life? You won't like this answer, but what's more humane, euthanasia of 1 dog, or factory farming of ~4 animals (who had lives anywhere from constant suffering to just slightly suffering) throughout it's lifespan.
  
  Ah the utilitarian approach. You're just one species away from saying it's okay to kill people because most people eat meat. Afterall the math problem is exactly the same for people, except people eat even more meat so from a math point of view it's even more logical to kill a person than a dog. I'll walk you through this conundrum.
  You can choose to say it is okay to kill people who eat meat and good luck talking about the ethics of killing people.
  You can choose to say it's not okay to kill people, but now you're not treating life equally because now a human life is worth more than the dogs life. So what's stopping me from saying that the the dog is worth more than the 4 animals who get killed?
  And if you want me to prove the dog is worth more than the animals I'll just ask you to prove that a human is worth more than the dog. If you can't prove that you're back to saying it's okay to kill people.
  You can't solve this problem through utilitarianism and then talk about ethics because utilitarian solutions often end up being unethical.
  
  I would rather say we should make it illegal to do things that cause an inordinate amount of suffering to animals. I would prefer not to kill the dog either, but since most people in this thread seem to believe a vegan diet with supplements is impossible for carnivore pets, what other option is there?
  Personally I see some difference between a dog and a human just as I see a difference between an ant and a dog, probably based on how consciously aware they are. Obviously I would hope to have legal or social consequences for people who eat meat. However If I had someone who would pay someone else to torture 1 animal a day, and then eat it, meaning ~30,000 animals would be tortured throughout their life, and I have no way to make them stop besides killing them, what is your proposed solution? I want to hear the non utilitarian answer to this problem, in this hypothetical where killing them is the only way to stop the behavior.
  The most "moral" thing to do would be for vegans to make it impossible for factory farming to exist, but veganism is still a minority and doesn't have that kind of power. You've baked in that the only options are "kill people who eat meat" or "do nothing." In a situation where all humans were strict carnivores, that's a much harder question. Should someone be allowed to exist when their existence relies on the suffering of others? I don't know and luckily I don't have to know because we can stop factory farming without killing anyone, and put pets on a maybe-suboptimal-requires-monitoring "abusive" diet, rather than factory farming millions of animals for them.
  e: this is basically just a more complicated version of the trolley problem, would you kill one person to save 4 others? what about kill one person to save 200 animals? I guess if you don't value animals at all, you would never kill the person. For me, yes at some point there would be a limit, where that is it's hard to answer.
  
  I would rather say we should make it illegal to do things that cause an inordinate amount of suffering to animals. I would prefer not to kill the dog either, but since most people in this thread seem to believe a vegan diet with supplements is impossible for carnivore pets, what other option is there?
  I don't think it's impossible but I do think it leads to the suffering of pets because most animal owners aren't capable of taking care of their pets right now and they'll be even less capable when they need to follow a relatively strict diet for their pet.
  However If I had someone who would pay someone else to torture 1 animal a day, and then eat it, meaning ~30,000 animals would be tortured throughout their life, and I have no way to make them stop besides killing them, what is your proposed solution? I want to hear the non utilitarian answer to this problem, in this hypothetical where killing them is the only way to stop the behavior.
  About that specific person? You do nothing. You can't force people (or animals) to live a different life. What you want to do is get a societal shift. Educate people so they'd willingly switch and over time (if it's reasonable and I do think going more vegan is reasonable) society will shift away from eating animals and those people will disappear with time.
  You’ve baked in that the only options are “kill people who eat meat” or “do nothing.” In a situation where all humans were strict carnivores, that’s a much harder question.
  If would argue if humans were strictly carnivorous the question would be much easier, because then eating meat is our nature and we would die if we went vegan. The reason we (and dogs) can go vegan is because from a dietary perspective we're both omnivores. For example with cats there's no question, they're biologically not adapted to plant based diet. Their entire diet would essentially be supplements and they get next to nothing from eating plants.
  Obviously I would hope to have legal or social consequences for people who eat meat.
  The most “moral” thing to do would be for vegans to make it impossible for factory farming to exist,
  I guess if you don’t value animals at all, you would never kill the person.
  And these are the examples why I have a problem with Veganism and why I think Vegans like you are a detriment towards people going more plant based with their diet. Because you're all about moral superiority, absolutes, guilting others for their lifestyles and assuming the worst. You won't change peoples mind if you call them a piece of shit. You also won't change their minds by not compromising on anything. And this "all change must happen instantly because we demand it" message is just childish behavior.
  If you're serious about getting people to eat less or no meat you can't expect instant results. You need to let people change their minds instead of trying to force them to change (and that includes trying to guilt them into changing). Also you can't change everyones mind but you need to change enough to for society to change over time. It's a process and it needs to be treated like a process. Don't force people, educate when you can and hope people change. After-all (hopefully) nobody forced you into becoming a vegan.
  
  "My extremist beliefs say I shouldn't own a cat. Cool. My extremist beliefs say that you shouldn't own a cat. Fuck off."
  
  I thought you were going to block all of my accounts? I even set about the process of logging in to each one and replying, "This one!" from each then got bored or distracted and didn't do it. I kind of liked the idea since you seemed to need a safe space and you could create it for yourself.
  
  How can mods ban an admin?
  
  I was surprised as well. Of course, they can unban themselves, which they did.
- We already feed cats what we want them to eat, you realize this, right?
  Go look what's in canned cat food and tell me which of it a cat would be eating if it was a wild cat. You'd have to generalize pretty hard and still all you'd be able to say is "they both would be eating meat".
  This whole issue is about whether its dangerous to have that discussion on a discussion board specifically for that topic.
  Its very telling that I can have this discussion in my veterinarians office with the staff there and have a markedly different experience than the average person here accusing vegans of harming cats.
  
  K.

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