Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
Humans have raised livestock for around 11000 years and most estimates place cat domestication at around 2000 with even the oldest most generous estimates placing it at 9500 so yes it is a natural part of humanity and domestication.
Animals eat other animals. Has been that way since the beginning of life.
Feeding your carnivorous animal tofu and vegetable blends with no meat ever even when medical animal doctors tell you that’s stupid and killing the animal isnt natural at all. And that’s probably only existed for about as long as the disease of social media has.
You should never force an animal to eat a diet its evolution has ruled out. The people that do this think they know best and none of them are veterinarians they are just crazy people who want to force their beliefs on all living things whether it kills them or not. Because killing the animals is super bad unless its by starvation of the nutrients their body needs and then its ok, I guess?
Also you said “and the admins sided with the idiots” when bringing this up implying that people who think cats should eat what they have always eaten are idiots and not the ones who will force their diet on any living thing, killing them be damned! Those people that would force their beliefs on living things even when it kills them are abusive idiots in my opinion and I hope their cats run away from them and go eat birds and shit to get their strength back.
There’s hiveminds and then there’s “hey evolution and modern science combined both can tell you this is a bad idea and going to kill this animal”. Pointing that out doesn’t make them a hivemind.
It’s hard to tell a cat what to eat or what not to eat. I posted about that in the thread. We had cats at home when I was a kid, we fed them regular (non vegan) cat food, but they also constantly killed mice and bugs and stuff like that. Apparently domestic cats decimate bird populations, and they kill way more than they actually eat.
All of that is irrelevant though. That thread is full of people who saw the words “obligate carnivore” and immediately inferred that a cat that doesn’t eat meat will die. That’s logically and scientifically ridiculous and ignores the actual definition of an obligate carnivore. So the stupidity was unbearable. It’s fine to get into a careful dicussion about cat nutrition involving veterinarian advice and scientific studies and reach a pro or anti vegan conclusion. But saying “obligate carnivore” as a thought-stopper and having it work on the site admin just showed that the site was too messed up to engage with. Simliar debates happen on Wikipedia all the time but each side brings miles of citations to the table. I.e., they would have at least weighed actual facts instead of stopping after a slogan decided everything.
Fwiw someone in the thread said that cats require taurine (an amino acid) in their diets and that taurine isn’t found in plant sources, but that it can be synthesized. Does a plant diet with synthetic taurine supplements give a healthy cat all by itself? IDK, but it means that the topic is more complicated than “obligate carnivore, hur hur!!”.
If its hard to tell a cat what to eat then put a bowl of some regular cat food out and put a bowl of the vegetarian stuff and see which one they pick. One or two days maybe they will take the vegan stuff but after that its not going to happen because their natural instincts and anatomy will prevail.
An obligate carnivore is an animal that cannot get all the nutrients it needs from plant matter and bacteria, so it requires nutrients found only in animal flesh. And veterinarians classify cats as obligate carnivores so I’m not sure why you think people are idiots for pointing that out.
I noticed you said the cat would go eat mice and bugs pretty much further reinforcing that they are carnivores and not vegan. I really hope you don’t have a cat
No that’s wrong, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore#Obligate_carnivores , “Obligate or “true” carnivores are those whose diet in the wild requires nutrients found only in animal flesh.” The key words are “in the wild”. As I mentioned in my post that I linked, it’s quite difficult (though possible) for humans to live purely on wild plants. Vegan humans usually consume a lot of beans and grains that have to be cooked before eating, i.e. transformed to a state not found in the wild. But then they do fine. Is the same possible with cats, particularly if can you add synthetic amino acids? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s a biology question that isn’t disposed of by the words “obligate carnivore”.
Preferences aren’t that relevant. Humans by nature usually prefer beer and doughnuts over anything healthy. They have to consciously override that impulse or end up like Homer Simpson.
Also regarding evolution, cats aren’t just carnivores, they’re predators. Their natural diet is meat that was killed just moments ago. If feed them instead on canned meat that was killed months ago, you’re turning them into scavengers, not so natural. Cows and chickens, of course, didn’t evolve to live in factory farms either.
Again though whether vegan diets are good or bad for cats is completely irrelevant to the stupidity of that thread. Even if you think it came to the right answer about cat diets, a stopped clock is right twice a day. The issue is rejecting any type of careful thought or research in reaching the conclusion, not the conclusion itself.
No I don’t have a cat. We had cats when I was a kid and we fed them cat food with meat in it (the concept of vegan cat food would have been totally alien to us at that time). We didn’t underfeed them. The cats killed mice and bugs anyway. They do that, it’s called “overkill”, a biology term that describes a predator animal killing more prey than it needs to eat. As I mentioned too, the cats even tried to feed US sometimes. They occasionally brought home dead mice or birds that they dropped in front of us. I don’t think we ever ate any though.