Previous Hexbear post on this issue by @ButtBidet@hexbear.net
@Rose 3•
As noted in my post on the “moderation incident”, by adding more subjectivity to the rules, you are opening the door to even more instance moderator misconduct. There is already evidence of how that would go.
Rooki felt it right to intervene in the !vegan cat food thread (and got a pat on the back with the new rules made to justify their actions), then not only took no issue with comments like “Meat is not something diabetics need to worry about.” but also fueled the fire in the same thread by saying “To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died.”
So much for taking action against harmful dietary advice.
That post is wild just carnist after carnist whining
Bewildered Carnist
“What the fuck is “vegan cat food”? I sometimes can’t understand people.”
“Ok. I get it. As people, we are bad. We mass husbandry just for food, modifying them with artificial selection for productivity. So I can understand veganism (although I am not vegan).”
“But have we really reached the point where we stop animals from eating meat? Either I’m a bigoted idiot or people are out of their minds.”
Brave Poster
“For me, the purpose of the post is exactly what it asks for. I don’t think I’ve ever posted to !vegan except for today, to cross-post the OP, but my own fate as an active lemmy.world user likely rests on the outcome of this request. I run a tiny community that has no relation to animal rights or ethics but I feel it is absolutely threatened when there are moderators like Rooki that act based on their views rather than the rules.”
Smug Carnist
“That vegan community has a rule against misinformation. The idea that a cat is perfectly healthy on a vegan diet is misinformation. You feel threatened by mods like Rooki who act based on rules rather than your views. You’d rather mistreat animals than admit that anything any vegan has ever said ever might be wrong, and not allow anyone to point out that your wrong.”
Concern troll Carnist
People are out of their minds. It’s a cult. Thankfully, mostly constrained to the west.
Famously some British folks invented caring about animal rights in 1940 or whenever. There has never been any large or long lived philosophical movements against the eating of animals outside the west. Certainly there are no religions that take non violence to mean that people should eat plant based. None at all. Outside britian and the vegan cult that is.
The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.
It’s a good policy imho, and I’m happy to see it
Science should prevail
I believe this study. It’s true that vegans say their vegan cats are healthier than other cats.
Vegan cats being the thing that tears .world apart is really funny because I’ve seen it irl and wouldn’t be surprised if ya’ll already had that struggle session here.
Not trying to start that debate here if not, but among most vegan groups I’ve been part of, many people had cats for years before adopting a vegan lifestyle in every other way, so it becomes a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. Otherwise, you get into endless arguments about how the cat havers aren’t really vegan. But the non-cat havers offer no real individual solutions and just tip toe around the idea that the cat haver should kill them to balance out the moral calculus, or give them to someone else to wash their hands of the issue while not materially affecting anything.
If you ever want to destroy a vegan community, ask if you should feed your cat a vegan diet or more generally about taking care of meat-eating animals at all.
Doubly funny, in an absurd way, is that .world will so fiercely advocate for their kitties, but ignore the deaths of humans that their favorite politicians are causing.
Hexbear had a nearly site destroying struggle session that took a while to rebuild from after vegancirclejerk was lifeboated. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the powder keg.
Nah I was there for it, it was 100% omnivores just being giant dickheads who saw themselves as the furthest left/most moral/whatever the fuck people being confronted with the gigantic moral black hole of how they enjoy the fruit of mass torture & murder. Eventually they couldn’t handle the heat so had to run crying to the mods. There were also the usual spurious accusations of vegans being anti-indigenous levied by non-indigenous people. Truly a deeply embarrassing episode that omnis here do their best to forget, just like they do their best to forget how if they witnessed the process of their meals being made for more than five minutes they would get lifelong PTSD. It’s fine to inflict that damage on the colonized people who work in the meatpacking plants though.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284132
To study health outcomes in cats fed vegan diets compared to those fed meat, we surveyed 1,418 cat guardians, asking about one cat living with them, for at least one year. Among 1,380 respondents involved in cat diet decision-making, health and nutrition was the factor considered most important. 1,369 respondents provided information relating to a single cat fed a meat-based (1,242–91%) or vegan (127–9%) diet for at least a year. We examined seven general indicators of illness. After controlling for age, sex, neutering status and primary location via regression models, the following risk reductions were associated with a vegan diet for average cats: increased veterinary visits– 7.3% reduction, medication use– 14.9% reduction, progression onto therapeutic diet– 54.7% reduction, reported veterinary assessment of being unwell– 3.6% reduction, reported veterinary assessment of more severe illness– 7.6% reduction, guardian opinion of more severe illness– 22.8% reduction. Additionally, the number of health disorders per unwell cat decreased by 15.5%. No reductions were statistically significant. We also examined the prevalence of 22 specific health disorders, using reported veterinary assessments. Forty two percent of cats fed meat, and 37% of those fed vegan diets suffered from at least one disorder. Of these 22 disorders, 15 were most common in cats fed meat, and seven in cats fed vegan diets. Only one difference was statistically significant. Considering these results overall, cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets. This trend was clear and consistent.
Not to be a stick in the mud here, but… what? How on earth does “cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets” follow after “considering these results overall”? You mean the results that weren’t statistically significant? Those results? And that one statistically significant disease difference? It was for kidney problems, and the vegan cats had more problems than the non-vegan ones (table 6).
If there’s a case for feeding cats a vegan diet, this ain’t it.
I’m actually genuinely surprised that cats do that well on a vegan diet. It doesn’t have to be healthier than meat to be an upgrade—if it’s on par with meat and no animal dies to make it, it’s a clear winner.
I didn’t think we were there yet with cat food, but the study seems to suggest we are, even if they try to draw a stronger conclusion from their data than they can actually justify.
Look at their data. The vegan cats are roughly where meat eating cats are:
READ THE STUDY!
Evidence concerning ingredient bioavailability and interactivity can indeed be lacking, but to our knowledge there is no published evidence that such concerns are any greater for non-animal-based ingredients, than for animal-based ingredients.
This is why feeding trials are considered the gold standard to ensure nutritional soundness of new formulations [15, 16]. The health status of cats maintained on different diets has been the subject of limited studies to date. In 2021 Dodd et al. [17] published a Canadian-based survey of 1,325 cat guardians, of whom 1,026 described their cat(s) diet. These included 187 (18%) vegan cats. More guardians of vegan cats reported their cat to be in very good health, and fewer were reported to have gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders. These cats were more often reported as having ideal body condition scores, than those fed a meat-based diet.
FFS don’t skim the study. 3% of non vegan cats had kidney problems, 4% of vegan cats did.
So you’re saying that vegan cats had roughly the same health as non vegan cats and we’re not destroying our planet in industrial livestock murder. Sounds great!
READ THE STUDY!
No need to shout. I did.
So you’re saying that vegan cats had roughly the same health as non vegan cats
No. That is not what the study is saying. The study is saying that “we took a look, and couldn’t tell if there was a difference or not.” Which is understandable, given the methodology. Internet-based questionnaires/surveys are easy to conduct, but tend to have big error bars. It’s a common trade-off made when first beginning to investigate a hypothesis.
It’s your typical “absence of evidence” versus “evidence of absence” conundrum. The authors note this in their comments on the limitations of their study and on avenues for further research:
As we’ve noted previously [30], large-scale cross-sectional or ideally, longitudinal studies of cats maintained on different diets, utilising objective data, such as results of veterinary clinical examinations and laboratory data, as well as veterinary medical histories, should yield results of greater reliability, if sufficient funding could be sourced.
and we’re not destroying our planet in industrial livestock murder. Sounds great!
Comrade, I’m not trying to argue that cats are “obligate carnivores,” or that cats should or should not have vegan diets. I’m not arguing about whether or not cats can meet their nutritional needs from vegan diets. I am only stating that the particular study linked does not provide any usable evidence in support of a conclusion. That’s literally what “no reductions were statistically significant” means: that the collected data is not sufficient to draw reliable conclusions.
Other studies may very well have more rigorous methodologies that convincingly demonstrate the nutritional completeness of vegan diets for cats. But not this study.
plus it was done by a pro vegan group
It was done by a uni. Fuck off, shit.just.works poster.
Guy (not OP, I mean the one from .world), fucking read the lit review. The unhealthiness of vegan cat food is based on vibes, not published evidence. There’s also a lot of back research that vegan cat food is fine, it’s not just this one study. Again, READ THE FUCKING STUDUY.
Im tempted to make a world account just to ram my face into this thread in particular. Just no thoughts in this persons head other than. Information justs slides right off like a tab of butter on a slide during a hot summer afternoon.
