All omnivores can be vegans. That means dogs can. Cats are not omnivores. They are carnivores
I wish this was true. I have some pet lizards I got before I went vegan, two of them are omnivores (blue tongue skink and Argentine black and white tegu). They can’t be vegan. I mean, honestly, if there was a large scale effort to research it, I bet we could come up with a suitable vegan diet for them, but I don’t think anyone will put a bunch of resources into that.
Cats can, actually. You just have to add enzymes to the food to help it break down so they can absorb it.
And other additives, of course, which are already added to most store bought cat foods already.
Thanks for the info @library_napper, I didn’t know that. Are those enzymes present in plant-based cat food or is it given separately. I knew people who tried feeding plant-based dry cat food to their cats and they still ended up with nutritional deficiencies. I wonder if those enzymes would have made a difference
The enzymes need to be added just before feeding it to them. If it’s added before, it would break down the nutrients in storage
Ah, thanks. That explains the problems cats that only eat the dried food experience
I believe it is taurine that cats need supplemented if fed a diet without meat.
That’s one additive. Its also added to store bought food with dead animals though, since it’s been processed so much that its void of taurine too.
You also need to add enzymes just before feeding.
No
Explain why. Dogs and cats need nutrients, not meat. There are vegan pet food brands that can supply them with all they need. Simply saying “A cat/dog is a carnivore, therefore it should eat meat” makes no sense, especially if you harm other animals in the process. That leaves us with taste - the same thing that doesn’t justify murder for humans.
Cats are obligate carnivores.
Quote:
cats (family Felidae), are obligate carnivores, meaning they cannot obtain all the nutrients that they need from the plant kingdom and bacteria.
When it comes to both recombinant animal protein as well as microbial- and plant-based protein for pet food, it is important to consider that although these products offer protein (as well as other nutrients that are naturally found in plants and microbes), none of these options are sources of nutrients that can only be produced by animal cells like taurine, arachidonic acid and vitamin A/retinol–and it is precisely these animal-based nutrients that are so important to consider when thinking about the dietary requirements of carnivores, such as cats. In terms of alternative sources of such animal-based nutrients, there are only two options: synthetically manufactured, or naturally produced by cultured meat.
To make cultured meat, we take a small collection of cells from an animal and then feed those cells all the nutrients they need to grow. In our case, we’ve isolated cells from mice, the ancestral diet of cats; as well as chicken, the most common ingredient in pet food.
In making cultured meat, instead of the growing cells obtaining their nutrients via food ingested by an animal, we instead feed those cells the nutrients directly, inside of a warm vessel called a bioreactor. Bioreactors are not a new technology. In fact, most people reading this article regularly consume food and beverages that are the products of bioreactors, such as yeast to make beer and bacteria commonly known as probiotics.
We feed our cells a proprietary blend of plant-based ingredients–in fact, very similar ingredients to what would be fed to a growing farm animal, such as a chicken or cow–and in the process of growing, our animal cells metabolize those nutrients to form new nutrients that only animal cells can make.
In the end, we harvest our cells as well as all of the important animal-based nutrients they’ve manufactured, and use this meat and nutrient-rich “slurry” as a one-to-one replacement ingredient for conventional meat slurries already used by pet food manufacturers.
https://vegconomist.com/interviews/biocraft-pet-manufacturers-desperate-stable-alternative/
If you care about animals why would you subject a cat to this?
If you want a pet, get a herbivore.
Rabbits
Hamsters
Tortoises
Fish
Gerbils
Most Birds
Iguanas
etc
etc
etc
I don’t have or want pets.
I think people who do have them should not kill other animals to feed them. It is possible when done with the right food. I have met several people in the past 20 years who fed their cats vegan without problems.
This study should be reason enough to not slaughter billions of animals for pet food.
Whats wrong with cultivated nutritions?
Obligate carnivore means cats can’t just live off of whole plant foods like rice and beans.
For example, cats famously need taurine, which is naturally found mostly in meat.
However, most cat food is already supplemented with extra taurine that was synthesized in a factory, because processing breaks down taurine. AFAIK that taurine is vegan. Wikipedia says
Synthetic taurine is obtained by the ammonolysis of isethionic acid (2-hydroxyethanesulfonic acid), which in turn is obtained from the reaction of ethylene oxide with aqueous sodium bisulfite. A direct approach involves the reaction of aziridine with sulfurous acid.
Cats being obligate carnivores means they can either eat meat or hyperprocessed industrial meat substitutes with all the nutrients of meat. Agreed that its better to just have a non-carnivore, though.
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