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…
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.