Update to Terms of Service + New Bylaws (Protections for users)

I think it's less applying their morals to the cat and more not wanting to support the meat industry. That said, yeah just don't have a cat. I expect many vegans aren't too big on the concept of pet ownership anyway.

Cats aren't just hunters. They're obligate carnivores. That means they literally can't get all the nutrients they need from a plant based diet. They need the vitamin A in meat in the same way that we need vitamin C.

I think all of this says more about the faith people have in the quality of their cat food.

Also people seem to love the words obligate carnivore but have not much understanding of the concept.

Oh and lastly, my favorite is discounting all evidence as anecdotal or "not good research".

This is some of the stupidest dogpiling ive seen and really drives home how simple the average person on here is.

"Hur dur, if people talk about the possibility of a vegan cat then surely their owners will starve them and refuse to change course until they die!"

Try reading some current information on it. It can be healthy for a cat to be vegan if it is done correctly.

The most difficult part is quote a lot of cats are picky to the point they won't eat the one or two brands that are actually nutritionally complete.

Its absurd they are banning even the discussion of this when research keeps trending towards the possibility of a healthy vegan cat.

Mostly, I think its absurd to think these discussions will actually hurt real cats. If the owner is basing their information on this websites shitposters, they are already a horrible owner.

I blocked all those vegan subs when this shit happened, they were already pretty bad tho.

Like if someone posted:

I'm not vegan but am looking to eat less meat

They were banned, so I figured out I was better off blocking than stumbling in one day.

But the original was just talking about feeding cats human vegan food. Then after admins stepped in, some mod went and found a single research article that said it could be possible with supplements...

But I think the supplements came from animals anyways?

So they advocated for something that would harm pets, then found the absolute bare minimum "proof" that in a very narrow situation no one was doing it might not harm the animal "significantly".

It legit seems like they're just trolling and trying to make vegans seem insufferable

It’s not. Cats have a super high protein requirement. So much that dogs and humans can die from kidney failure if they eat only cat food.

This is less likely to help the cat than someone also saying the actual diet requirements

My idea was that respectful, dissenting opinions posted in a small ratio should be allowed in all communities.

It works well in this situation because you can have ten vegans posting about how vegan diets are great for cats, but you'd still have at least one guy posting "This isn't safe for your cat. Please find sources that aren't biased before doing this."

I don't know if a vegan diet is safe for cats or not, and I shouldn't need to. Having that one dissenting voice is helpful in prompting people not to trust everything they read on the internet. c/flatearth can still have their narrative, but a policy like this would help put the brakes on it a little.

Of course, do consider this policy in a community that you agree with. This would mean that someone would be allowed to post Russian propaganda in the Ukraine community. If they spam it, it can still be removed. If they're rude, it can be removed. But if it's just one Russian comment for every ten comments refuting it, I would hope the ten comments are enough to handle it.

The idea of Obligate Carnivore is fully lost on some. And that’s quite a sad reality.

It seems to me that a lot of people are using that term without knowing what it means. That, too, is a sad reality. It means that cats in the wild aren't able to live off non-meat sources that they can find there, similar to how humans can't live in subfreezing temperatures without shelter or clothing. It says nothing about whether their dietary needs can be fulfilled without meat in a domestic environment. Maybe yes, maybe no, but you can't just parrot the words "obligate carnivore" like a Fox News anchor and act like that gives you the answer. The world is more complicated than that.

In fact, based on other info, cats do seem to be able to survive on human-supplied vegan diets, but it's less clear that they can enjoy optimal health on such a diet. So the reality seems to be somewhat shaded.

Even for humans, being a well-nourished vegan is somewhat difficult (you have to pay attention to stuff like protein combination). It's even harder to be a so-called "raw vegan" (living entirely from uncooked vegetables such as in salads) but apparently it can still be done. Most human vegans consume a lot of beans and grains that are inedible without cooking.

You can imagine an animal species for which cooked beans and grains would be a completely healthy diet, and yet that diet is never seen in the wild because wild animals don't cook. Thus they would get their protein instead from animal sources, i.e. be obligate carnivores, even though they would be fine on steamed rice and tofu. There is no logical incompatibility between "obligate carnivore" and "vegan diet". It's a question of biology that is species specific. In the limit, you could inagine a Star Trek replicator synthesizing perfect mouse meat from pure carbon and other elements, giving you a completely healthy and satisfied vegan cat that thinks it is eating freshly killed mice.

It doesn't appear possible for humans to stay healthy for long periods as fruitarians (some people don't want to cut or kill living plants for food, but instead live off of fruits and nuts that have naturally fallen off the plants). But that can only be known through experimental observation, not linguistic knee jerks. You have to examine the details to understand the real situation for any particular species, food type, and preparation method

Obligate and facultative carnivores. Don't forget the dogs.

Sure, explain it to me. What is it that a cat can't get from non-meat sources?

I've experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and immaturely as well. This recent incident is part of a pattern of behavior.

If you won't admit Rookie made a mistake then it makes the whole site/team look bad.

Amending the rules puts out a message of: "we were right the whole time but you all just didnt understand it".

Also, not working out doesnt mean a dead cat. It meant she didnt like the taste of it so I switched back to food she would eat, with meat in it.

I'm glad you aren't insane (really - I might think you're crazy for trying, but thank you for seeing reason when it didn't work out), but you have to understand that some people are. They will literally starve their pet out of their own foolish ideals.

Your post shouldn't be downvoted. This is without question the best way to deal with this - speak to someone that not only knows about this stuff, but likely deals with it on a regular basis. They are LITERALLY FUCKING TRAINED TO DEAL WITH THIS!

Also, not working out doesnt mean a dead cat. It meant she didnt like the taste of it

She actually did like the vegan kibble but she’s a majority wet food eater and didnt like the vegan wet food.

Pick one

They are literally saying the opposite.

We didn't cover that in ESL, because open to interpretation means open to interpretation. If what you're trying to say in your comment was the admins intention then the language should've been: "Admin's interpretation of the rules is the last word and will be judged in a case by case basis". There's nothing wrong with that, it's how laws and court systems work. Anyone can interpret laws as they see fit (see sov citizens) but when push come to shove, judges have the last word and the courts interpretation is the only valid interpretation of the law. Hence debate based trials, checks and balances. When rules are open to interpretation, they become useless as a tool for defining truth.

I think initially it was simply because Ellen pao might have wanted freedom of speech. The funny thing is that the people she defended turned against her

But this turned into an issue eventually Steve seemed to get rid of some communities, and allowed places like thedonald to flourish. I believe he just wants money.

So you could be right

If you think lemmy.world is worthless then you are mistaken.

Pickles is a cat? If so, yes, Pickles will prevail. Those guys are ninjas at finding meat, i.e., songbirds.

we surveyed 1,418 cat guardians, asking about one cat living with them, for at least one year.

I believe this study. It's true that vegans say their vegan cats are healthier than other cats.

quoting from your link: No reductions were statistically significant. Only one difference [re:disease] was statistically significant.

plus it was done by a pro-vegan group with obvious bias. so the results from the pro-vegan funded study are not terribly good at supporting veganism for cats as more healthy. it's about the same, maybe less disease (severity of disease wasn't covered in the abstract but would be a significant part of a decision). show me a study not funded by a pro-vegan group with similar or better results before I consider feeding my pet a diet very different from their natural diet.

Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I'm surprised made it into plos.

For instance I couldn't find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of "healthiness" as performed by the authors.

Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don't make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I'd have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.

In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.

Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That's just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.

lets say hypothetically your pet cat would be healthier and happier if you bypassed their stomach and digestive system entirely to simply feed them the required nutrients by direct injection. (doesn't matter how this is done, it's a hypothetical.)

Let's just say for the sake of the argument this is a magic black box that infinitely produces these nutrients and injects them at no immediate or long term cost. It consumes no power, doesn't require charging or reloading, it simply makes it so that your cat no longer has to eat.

Would this be ethical? We do a similar thing with humans on life support, and there's lots of debate about this being highly unethical. There's lot of push for medically assisted suicide/death in cases where it would be prudent.

Vegans saying that cats, which are obligate carnivores, can subsist on a vegan diet; admin removed it as misinformation. The vegan community then threw a fit over it.

Merely existing is harming living beings

Our bodies fight and kill bacteria all the time

Fun fact! Glue is put into the cheese on pizza slices for promotional purposes. It's what gets them that nice stringing stretching cheese on video.

Okay so no jokes on the internet anymore then right.

Y'all need to follow your premises through mentally.

I'm pretty much a reddit refugee in that my reddit activity is limited to checking the community I moderate, simply as a token to all the users, but as I noted in that post, even reddit doesn't seem to interfere in its communities unless pushed to do so by all the other communities. The "free speech absolutist" straw man also hardly applies to reddit, as it still takes action against harassment, illegal content, and things like that - exactly what I would expect from a platform like Lemmy.

The real interesting thing is that just ~14 months ago this wasn't the case. Anti-Vegans and a shift to more right wing "opinions" sadly go hand in hand.

If you're talking about the upvotes and the supportive comments, I'm not even sure they reflect how the community would feel had they seen the full sequence of events* leading up to that decision.

As I previously mentioned, seemingly the first comment to start the chain of !vegan moderators' and subsequent Rooki actions was the impolite "don't force your shit on them" one-line comment by a user first exonerated, but later banned for trolling in another community by none other than Rooki.

The vegan comments were way lengthier, containing balanced ("it's important to do a bit of extra research", "cat nutrition is too complicated to be trying to make at home") and seemingly thoughtful takes with a link to the NCBI.

Conversely, Rooki's line of arguing contained little but outbursts like "have a nice rest of your life knowing you killed your loved pet" and "If anyone else thinks pets should be vegan i have no problem banning them for being a troll and promoting killing pets", with unsubstantiated yet specific claims like "YES cats can survive vegan diet for few months".

Sure, Rooki admitted to being emotional and said sorry after my post asking for their removal, but what's the weight of that apology if the new rules echo those same talking points, from "misinformation" to the quite specific example "Unhealthy diets, e.g. due to insufficient nutrients"?

*Screenshots sent to me by a !vegan mod after my post - verifiable via the public modlog.

Lulz

I agree, I literally guessed it was related to Rooki when "moderation incident" was mentioned.

They also handled the MBFC situation terribly

Exactly. Those positions should generally be separated. Relying on a programmer that helps with running the instance on a technical level or developing for the instance inevitably weighs on the decision-making process when assessing their position as a moderator. Having that extra pull enables the moderator to misbehave with impunity.

Is there anywhere I can see the original post? I feel like there is a fair point to be made that a vegan diet for cats could be possible.

I support the removal of misinformation, but surely that is a fair point to make.

I wasn't party to it from the start since I'm not a vegan and I didn't see the original discussion, but from my understanding: Vegans were having a discussion on the possibilities and risks of vegan cat food, in the vegan community Lemmy world. A Lemmy world admin invaded that discussion and started using his admin/mod powers to push his unsubstantiated opinion on the subject and silence the voice of users who had another opinion. And now apparently there's new rules being added to justify that kind of admin behaviour.

And this is also apparently not the first time that that admin abused their mod powers, since I read a few comments in this thread saying something like "oh, an admin abusing mod powers, that's probably going to be xxx again".

Yes, yes I did. Thanks

You can literally go read what he did. I'm not going to have the same debate here that they had over in the vegan community thread.

I agree, and also of the opinion that a significant portion of people who yell the loudest about “freedom of speech” are only doing so because they want to force others to listen to what is essentially bullshit, and any attempts to call them out is somehow impinging on a non-existent right to free speech. And I do hope it’s understood that there is no right to free speech other than pertaining to the government; mods and site operators are free to edit, block, delete or silence as they see fit no matter what we think. However, I do agree there is some form of social contract to at least enforce a perceived right to free speech in society.

Personally, I have become intolerant of intolerance - especially of the kind that believes it has the right to spew what is objectively bullshit.

We learned a near decade ago now that deplatforming hate speech, dangerous rhetoric, and misinformation stops it in it’s tracks.

Uh ... source? Really not sure what world you're living in, but I'm living in one with covid conspiracy theories.

Well that would be pro-mia.

Is this response still in review?

Okay, specifically ignoring fediaf language because they're a vet nutritionist with strong understanding of amino acid profiles and bioavailability I take it (and I'm talking about the trigger happy admin here) https://europeanpetfood.org/pet-food-facts/fact-sheets/nutrition/vegetarian-diets/

1. I don't see anything there about what (if anything) was absorbed from the c/vegan incident. If you're still working on it, that's fine, just say so, there's not a huge rush. The original post instead seems to imply that some kind of decision was reached, but leaves it up to user detective skills to figure out what it is. I'm an outsider to c/vegan, I'm not out for anyone's blood, but I saw the intervention as a good faith error that should explicitly be called out as one. Any resulting policy change should be designed to prevent similar errors going forward. If you've decided something different from that (i.e. that the intervention was valid and that you want to see more of the same), that's fine, it's your server, but please tell us in so many words so we can react accordingly.
2. The same thing about the academic journals. "Encouraged" is one thing but it would help enormously if you tell us what the admins are going to do if someone posts based on direct observations, personal experience, etc. It's well established now that the COVID-19 virus is transmitted through the air and that N95 respirators and HEPA air purifiers are hugely valuable preventive measures, but it took a ridiculously long time for health authorities to admit that fact (Science, Nov 2022). Thus in many cases, community awareness about health issues is ahead of the authorities and journals. We should be encouraging that, not trying to shut it down. (See for example r/ZeroCovidCommunity on Reddit).

Anyway, I've been under the belief that the instance admins are basically server operators or assisting the server operators, dealing with system maintenance and software problems, or sometimes, serious and obvious policy breaches like threats of violence. They aren't supposed to be medical experts or pet dieticians, so (following Reddit, since Lemmy positions itself as a Reddit alternative) they should generally defer to community mods about discussions within communities. Community mods, at least, are supposed to have some kind of understanding of the topics under discussion.

If you're saying that server admins should be able to override community mod decisions about discussions regarding stuff like pet diets, then fine, but again, tell us so we know what kind of environment we're in.

Ah yes, the big bad government with their 5g magnetic vaccines.

That better be vegan fucking popcorn.

👍

To generalise is easy. To spot colour in a black and white world is a bit harder but in the end well worth it.

Fearmongering with your lies.

Cats are actually healthier on formulated plant-based kibble synthesized with taurine, b12 and vitamin a.

It's spreading, like ~_{monkey pox}

FTFY

Reading through your comments here, I wonder if you’re not better off seeing up your own instance of Lemmy somewhere?

Yeah, it was definitely Animal abuse. Switching carnivorous animals to plant-diets to satisfy their humanitarian urges, is straight up abuse.

When I argued sanely over there I was basically just called a carnal apologist and banned. Shit was wild. Glad Lemmy picked up this stance; because what they were advocating was entirely wrong.

They spread too. You get one loopy sub and it can take over an adjacent sub over time. Members get tired of the content in their community and will go to the nearest most-similar one for more content.

These rules don't need to be forever but if lemmy is currently having a problem with something (I don't actually know what this is all about) I'm all for updating TOS so they can fix it.

It was a hypothetical

Wth no actual example. But just to pick one, is it controversial to advocate for mandating public masking? I would say so. The consensus has moved on to making this a personal choice, but I could very easily make the "controversial" argument that this is ableist, and that mandating masking will save lives.

It's not going to be very popular though, that's for sure.

I'm not actually looking to debate this, but just pointing out there are legitimate debates to be had around COVID.

The other post isnt going to change the new rules from this post.

Have you apologized yet?

Have you considered that you may not be a good fit for Admin?

I appreciate your hard work. Are there any plans to address Rooki's actions? This is not the first time they have had an emotional response in moderation and used mocking language to belittle users.

Did you literally just tell them "if you don't like the rules then you are free to leave"?

You do know that everyone is aware they are not trapped here right?

Don't send them here.