So according to the ethics of veganism it’s about valuing sentient life and animal consent.
So I pose a few questions.
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Is it justified to buy animal based dog and cat food?
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Is it justifiable to force a dog or cat to be vegan?
If 1 is justifiable then the claim that it’s unethical for humans to eat meat is untrue since feeding your pets meat requires more animals to be raised for slaughter.
If 2 is true then it violates animal consent because there are zero dogs or cats that prefer vegan food to meat and infact are naturally omnivorous in the case of dogs or pure carnivores in the case of cats.
So the logical conclusion would be owning meat eating pets in impossible while being vegan.
Then it leads to the ethics of what happened to the breeds of cats and dogs no longer able to be pets.
Babe, go grab the popcorn, someone posted about vegan pets again!
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ🍿
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“Owning” pets isn’t vegan. Hosting rescued animals, sure.
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If you kill a pig to feed a cat, it’s like a “zero-sum game”. This means that you need a secondary criteria to make the decision, if you don’t want to play favorites (make a biased decision over who lives). This is the bloody chaos created by animal breeders.
In this situation, you are the “death panel”. Just ask people who work in animal shelters how they make the decisions, that may be a better guide than rolling dice or flipping a coin.
Like with other domestic animals who’ve been genetically sabotaged by humans, the goal is their extinction. “Pets” also include exotic animals, in which case sanctuaries and returning them to the wild are worthy goals.
Dogs can make it, cats are an issue and it would be good to have some of that non-animal-based “lab meat” for cats. And people who want these non-human animals to be like fitness models - pictures of ideal health or “platonic forms” of pets - are not serious people, they live in privileged fantasies and should be ignored.
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Pretty much this. Don’t own other beings as property. Don’t instigate violence against peaceful beings. Do not attempt to restrict the freedom of other beings. It really is that simple.
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I agree. Peaceful cohabitation without domination can work quite well. I don’t even know how many animals share this house, but it’s probably hundreds at least. If they don’t bother me, I don’t bother them. It’s only when the cohabitation is involuntary/non-consensual or when someone tries to control others by force or coercion that it becomes a problem.
Scenario 1: you leave the dog at the shelter and it eventually gets killed.
Scenario 2: you bring the dog home and feed it so that it doesn’t get killed.
I don’t see any ethical issue with my dogs eating the same foods I do. Why would i order the deaths of other animals for the sake of their taste buds?
I don’t see any ethical issue with my dogs eating the same foods I do.
Dogs can’t eat grapes, onions, garlic, cashews, almonds, chocolate etc. There’s some pretty big ethical issues feeding your dogs the same food you eat.
Cats and dogs can’t survive purely on veggies. It’s not just for their taste buds.
Dogs totally can. They are omnivores like us and evolved alongside us. Obviously they’d eat meat if given the choice so it’s still a restrictive diet that they never got to choose for themselves, and that’s an ethical minefield for vegans, but they can totally live on plants.
Cats are carnivores. I don’t think they can live a full healthy life without at least some meat.
Cats require specific vitamins such as taurine, which in nature would be derived from meat. In 21st century society, it is produced synthetically and easily supplemented.
Good point, it’s not like I don’t take B12 most days!
Pets don’t get to choose what they eat, vegan or otherwise. Most pets thrive just fine on eating more or less the same couple foods all their life. “forcing therm” to eat vegan food is ethically the same as “forging them” to eat regular kibble.
Right, because pets are not free to make their own choices. They’re property.
That’s the ethical minefield I was talking about.
That a dumb take. Small children are also not free to pick the food they eat. Their parent chose their food. Are children property? If that’s a minefield, it’s a pretty weak one.
The difference is children spend 1/5 to 1/4 of their life being “not free” the animals you force to eat vegan spend their whole life stuck in that life style
When parents decide to deprive their children of vaccines, or block them from gender affirming care, or use corporal punishment, or any other things that “parental rights” freaks believe in- what do you think that is?
A huge portion of people consider children to be property, they want the right to control their children and to abuse them however they want.
Those things are actively harming children. Supplemented vegan food is not like being violent to pets.
Because dogs are NOT herbavors and it’s not consenting to that life style. Even “vegan” dogs will eat meat if given the chance.
See the scenarios above. Are you suggesting that dogs would choose death over a life where they dont get to eat their favourite foods?
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The choice they are given, as a result of the society we live in, is eat a plant-based diet with an adoptive family, or be killed by the state.
Unadopted dogs don’t get released into the wild to live freely and fend for themselves, they get killed.
The lesser-harm option seems pretty clear.
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Cats can’t properly digest plant matter. They have very few taste buds and no sweet receptors for a reason. They can only digest meat.
These are important questions that not enough people are asking. See my other comment, but basically, I agree with your conclusion.
