Hi! I'm not a veterinary nutritionist, but I did used to teach metabolic biochemistry, and I spoke to a few veterinary nutritionists before putting my own dog on a vegan diet. Dogs are omnivores, so there are many vegan diet options dogs can live on healthily and happily. We like to think of dogs as friendly wolves, but they evolved a significantly different metabolism to co-exist with humans. I use a combination of Wild Earth and Bramble. Cats are obligate carnivores, so they require some chemicals (most notably Taurine) that don't naturally occur in plants. But there's no strong scientific barrier to us creating vegan cat diets through supplementation in the near future.
I don't really understand why you're being downvoted, this was my understanding as well. There are plenty of vegan dog foods that seem to have a history of success and meet all AAFCO standards.
I think as far as vegan cat food, I'm not sure it will be healthy or feasible at scale until/unless there's something like Wild Earth's mouse-meat kibble based on cultured cells (under development, but no time frame given for expected completion).
I'd love to hear the opposing perspective, though.
It is very difficult to imagine a vegan diet for cats that has enough plant-sourced protein while remaining palatable. Most commercial cat food is far too high in carbohydrates and is usually high in fat. This increases the palatability and lowers costs but is not healthy for the cats.
Cats are picky eaters, and they can refuse foods even when starving.
It may be technically true that animals like dogs and humans with meat-optimized digestive systems can survive off plant material alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s advisable. Neither of us can metabolize cellulose, both of us run into metabolic diseases with excessive carbohydrate consumption (e.g. diabetes), etc.
I mean, I think everyone agrees that way too much sugar or eating nondigestible plants is not a good idea.
But a vegan diet has been approved for humans at all stages of life, and the vegan dog food I'm aware of meets all AAFCO standards (nutrients, digestibility, protein:carb:fat ratio) as well as passing tests for dog interest/palatability.
There's a big difference between a well-rounded plant-based diet, and living off sugar or cellulose-heavy raw plants.
> But a vegan diet has been approved for humans at all stages of life
Well if it’s been “approved” then no need to worry! Who exactly “approved” it and why do I care what they say?
> There's a big difference between a well-rounded plant-based diet, and living off sugar or cellulose-heavy raw plants.
There are like 4 edible plants that don’t provide 90% of their calories in the form of sugars (starches are a kind of sugar). There are also very few plants that don’t have a huge cellulose content.
I'm the vegan in this house, not the dogs. Just this morning on my daily pre-WFH walk I was reminded that many non-humans eat other animals (crows aren't quick about it, either) and that they do not share my ethics, nor should be expected to. Enjoy the canned rabbit, Rover.
You’re getting a lot of comments along the lines of “aren’t you being inconsistent by letting your dog eat meat?” And I just want to add one point (not for you, OP, but for the group of replies). We don’t have to be perfectly consistent beings, and it’s often better that we are not.
Being a vegan owner who has a carnivore dog is still better than being a carnivore owner with a carnivore dog. It’s better to be inconsistently ethical than it is to be consistently unethical.
I think we can get into logic traps here on HN that ignore the realities (and benefits!) of the messiness of human behavior.
I'm not sure your animal's will simply existing is a reasonable argument for allowing their will to be enacted, which sounds like what you're implying. And even if you're implicitly restricting this to food choice, your dog would not put animals in poor farming conditions of his own volition.
But this is only a critique of your statement. I feed my animals farmed pet food.
No, their dog would chase down and kill animals wherever they are, poor farming conditions or not, of their own volition. Animals are interested in eating meat, full stop. How that meat is raised is consequently of no interest to them, though it may be of interest to you.
Technically, if we weren't blocking dogs from leaving the house, they would be out there and eating anything they could get their paws on; they would be enacting their will, on other pets, rodents, etc.
That the dog was doing what a dog is instinctually likely to do, depending on their temperament. This would be a failing of human training, because human training is intended to replace some instincts with learned behaviors, since dogs have such a 'people pleasing' mindset when trained with compassion and positive reinforcement.
I'm not sure what your point was. Their dog doesn't share their ethics, nor should they be expected to. I would not expect a dog to 'de-escalate' a situation with another very angry dog, despite expecting humans to try and do that when faced with another very angry human.
If a dog has a violent temperament, training is nice but eventually irrelevant. It should just never be kept in a neighborhood where humans live, or where it has any chance of coming close to any human. Instead it should be kept in a fenced area. And it should never breed. Or maybe even put down.
Dogs with “violent temperaments” often get that way solely from abuse. In such cases, training absolutely helps, as does unconditional love. I have seen it multiple times, anecdotally.
My point is that you DO have a part on what your dog is doing, you cannot just let a pet behave like a feral animal. Hence the argument of "this is what the dog feels like doing" is dull.
Dogs won’t, by and large, attack your neighbor’s leg by default, unless they are provoked or have previously been abused. Nobody is advocating for letting them act like a feral animal.
But just as you teach your kids to have manners, we teach our animals to have them too.
Ah, I see the Hypocrisy Police are as responsive as ever. When the shelters are empty of animals, we will no longer have pets. Mull that over and you'll have your answer.
There is this popular meme that pet ownership is inherently good and makes owners morally superior. Hint: That is factually wrong. But it leads people to deceive themselves. And as long as this holds, pets will be bred to meet the demand, pet owners will give them to shelters and shelters will never get emptier. Worse: Every pet you take from the shelter will increase market pressure to resupply. The only way to get less pets in shelters is to decrease the supply. That means decreasing pet ownership overall. Make pet ownership frowned upon like smoking. Prohibit breeding altogether.
If I understand correctly, then I would say it's your choice to perpetuate owning a pet, specifically a dog. And in fact, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, with careful planning dogs can be plant based, and there are even synthesized amino acids available that normally only come from animals but can be grown from yeasts and mushrooms. So you can have your dog and not need to support killing other animals.
TL;DL: Feeding pets the animal byproducts of our own food production is not only a good symbiotic relationship, but also contains more of the nutrients the pets need (as opposed to grain-free or other specialty diets). But, the specifics for your pet will vary based on their own needs and allergies.
I haven't met a vegan who argues dogs should never eat meat. I have heard about it on nightly news from time to time, but I would think that's a very fringe, very uninformed niche of people who got the memo but didn't read it.
The vegan perspective is less "meat is bad" and closer to "compassion for a creature and its rights to exist freely within its own context". A killer whale should be able to nom as many seals as it wants, a dog can have some raw meat to chew on.
I think the dog problem has more to do with you killing animals to feed to your dog. As far as I can tell, vegans don't oppose animals in the wild hunting to survive (i.e. a killer whale).
However, paying for animals to be killed to feed your dog instead of buying vegan dog food seems like it falls under the same umbrella as buying meat for yourself.
[Not really sure how to address obligate carnivores, like cats. Could see a vegan feeding their cat they had meat foods until they died naturally, but getting a cat with the intention of buying meat for it over its lifetime seems non-vegan.]
Would welcome correction if I'm misguided, though.
Your second paragraph is basically why I will never own a pet.
I can't ethically feed my pet, therefore owning a pet is unethical.
I love dogs, clumsy waggy little fuckers, but I won't subject another being to my fuckery just because I can.
edit: And yes, I teeter-totter on the ol' "you should adopt an abandoned pet" vs "feeding it for the rest of its life means other animals will die" vs "but you eat meat too you sanctimonious fuck" every time I think about the subject. At the end of the day, easier just to say "no pets" and move on with life for me.
If feeding was the only thing keeping you from caring for an animal, you could either adopt an herbivorous pet (most small mammals, maybe?) or adopt an omnivore capable of eating a plant-based diet (dogs?). In either case it seems like a moral net positive to me.
...though I also understand the "no pets" and moving on attitude from a more personal angle. I've accidentally killed enough houseplants to scare me away from the "caring for a dependent living being" plan for now
Edit: just wanted to note that "people who got the memo but didn't read it" is now one of my favorite phrases. I've never heard it before, but something about it delights me
As a kid we didn't have a good run with pets so it's just easier to say "no" to owning animals and move on with a clear conscience.
Having said that, I do find myself always playing devil's advocate with myself: "But how can your conscience be clear when millions of abandoned pets are being put to sleep in animal shelters? So it's everyone else's job to deal with that is it? You would deny your children the joy of owning a cute little doggo woggo?" and to that nascent neurofractal I say, get in line, the CBT will get to you eventually.
So I dunno, I don't want to come across as being down on people who've made a decision to own pets, it's possible to overthink things and underthink things. I know many pet owners and the vast majority are kind and caring. I think it comes with the territory. Some have been more domineering and lord over their creatures like a ruthless dictator and I think that says a lot about a person, but I digress...
I pretty much agree with everything you just said, and I pretty much kill every plant I touch as well. Brown thumb gang!
Dogs at least can easily live happy, healthy lives on a plant-based diet. It isn't cruel at all, as long as you're feeding your pet all the vitamins and minerals they need.
Depends on if one needs to do it to survive. This is why vegans try to hold humans accountable, but not lions. The "who" has very significant moral implications.
Oh I know, I agree with you :) I'm vegan. I was speaking more generally about how the idea of needing to eat animals to survive is what makes it ethical, but that is VERY rarely ever the case
100% agree with you. Keeping a "pet" locked on your home for the purpose of vanity and keeping you entertained for a few mins/day is outrageous. Praising animal rights but choosing to ignore this is the ultimate hypocrisy.
Yes, and we control their reproductive needs by shaming them for wanted to hump a leg every now and then, or keeping an opposite sex companion away from them, keeping them in isolation, never giving them the ability to have sex, a natural part of their species. Or we perform surgery on them to not have babies.
Or we let them breed, but we pick their partners and then take their babies. If we did this to humans there would be outrage right?
It's fine to feel that animal husbandry is unethical, but considering that domestication occurred already, how do you propose the management of domesticated species?
Just letting them free would be cruel, because the domesticated animals and surrounding ecosystem have not adapted to eachother. They will probably either hurt the ecosystem (cats and pigs) or die out after losing human care (cattle).
It doesn't seem ethical at all to just pretend that domesticated animals are people and so need human rights. They need animal rights, which depending on the species may be completely different.
Your assumptions are showing. There are a thousand reasons people keep pets that have nothing to do with either vanity or entertainment.
Pets offer an extremely potent form of emotional therapy, and that is a very personal connection that has nothing at all to do with vanity or entertainment. Both of the latter are typically secondary effects, not primary.
Well, of course, I didn't type my comment by accident!
Regarding your point:
Number of service dogs in the US: ~500,000 [1]
Number of dogs kept as pets in the US: ~76 million [2]
It's not even 1%. I understand the argument you bring but in practice is literally a rounding error. The overwhelming majority of pets serve a function of vanity and/or entertainment.
Again, you are making assumptions here that are invalid. You are talking about service dogs; I am not.
Service dogs do save lives, and are immensely important, but that is explicitly not my point.
I am talking about the fact that many pet-owners do gain emotional value and support from animals. Emotional animal support can be extremely effective therapy for humans, but would not count as a service animal. However, I don't think that anyone in their right mind would argue that situation is a function of vanity and/or entertainment.
And before you go try and find data: no, there aren't a lot of registered 'therapy animals,' because that is a hot-topic political issue, and people don't differentiate them well from service animals. Not to mention that society continues to think 'mental health problems' are mostly either made-up or to be looked down upon.
There not being a lot of registered ones does not mean that the emotional support and stability gained by having a pet does not do absolute wonders from a therapeutic perspective.
It has been formalized a bit[1], but has been going on informally for centuries, since animals and humans do form close emotional bonds.
Since the parent tried to make the case that people only have pets for vanity. This is my point; there are lots of reasons people have pets, and the top one, usually, is an emotional connection.
You do not derive the same emotional value from eating meat. One is sustenance, and the other has been bred for centuries to have an extreme emotional connection with humans.
I agree it's not an ideal situation, but I honestly think it's better than the alternative.
In your example of me personally, this is kind of the tradeoff most small humans (including myself) made for the first ten years of life. Supervision, lack of freedom, etc. in exchange for food, shelter, and hopefully companionship.
As it's not ideal, I could agree with you on reducing breeding so we don't have to make this choice in the future. But currently, for domesticated animals who can't be released into the wild without high chance of extreme pain to themselves (dogs) or major ecological damage (cats), it seems like our kindest option is to put as many of them in loving & protective situations as possible.
I feel this is a false dichotomy. If we really stop breeding pets, and do this consequently and with an honest effort, this will become a non-issue in, like, 10 years.
This kind of personifying glib is what gives vegan/vegetarian ethics a bad name. It completely ignores domestication and how dogs evolved as human-following scavenger animals. Most dog breeds are not adapted to living without humans. Dogs in the wild live much shorter lives and get parasites.
You aren't a dog, so your preference for not living under the care of a human owner is not relevant. Dogs do not outlast us in the wild, because "the wild" is the real world we live in today. Stray dogs are invasive in most ecosystems, and are usually not well adapted to their environments.
Dogs are intelligent enough to show preferences, and thanks to tens of thousands of years of selective breeding, they generally prefer people. Strays are a tragedy.
There is no dissonance, the reasoning you gave was that you (or the reader) would certainly not prefer to live with benevolent captors as an emotional support object, so a dog likely would not either. This is not invalid reasoning, but Man's relationship with The Dog is more complicated than that. Domesticated dogs were created by selective breeding by humans over thousands of years, and this is well established.
I posit that dogs on average prefer domestic life because they were selectively bred to prefer it for thousands of years. I am honestly surprised this is controversial. We know for a fact that many dog breeds are not compatible with living in nature without human help, and would not survive.
What is the ethical thing to do now, that we cannot change the past, and domesticated animals exist? I don't think breeding dogs is ethical. I also don't think lettings dogs out into nature is ethical, at all.
You are making unstated assumptions: we have no idea if dogs, by this point, have been bred to seek human companionship, which we believe generally to be the case. If left alone, lacking companionship (since most pet owners don't tend to be abusive, though it can happen), I would argue the animal would potentially be much less happy on the street.
That has nothing to do with me wanting to own a pet, and everything to do with there being plenty of pets available who I would rather get loved by someone than, well, die on the street.
