Vegan Cats

Radical Vegans piss me off.

The worst I’ve seen from these morons is the claim that feeding their pet cats, er, companion felines, a Vegan diet is not only healthy, but more healthy than feeding them meat based food.

I’ve heard some fucking ludicrous shit in my life, but this one takes the cake! Even the goodly portion of the Rational Vegan crowd don’t agree with this idea.

The argument from the MV’s is that if you provide any animal with the proper nutrients, then the base of what the food is made from is irrelevant. Taurine, which cats cannot produce at all, is normally only found in animals, never in plants, but taurine has been synthesized for some time now and therefor can be added into the food, providing the nutrition needed by the animal.

Synthesized taurine? I thought the whole goal of Vegan ideals is to “return to the natural order”?

This is not the only problem with the idea, however. Cats also need vitamin B12, vitamin A, arachidonic acid, niacin and thiamin supplied in their diets to be healthy. Vitamin B12 is only found in meat, produced by bacteria that lives in animals, but not in plants, unless they’re rotting. Cats cannot digest the provitamin A of vegetables, only the retinol version of vitamin A found in meat. Humans can produce arachidonic acid from linoleic acid present in vegetable fat, but cats lack the enzymes needed to do this, thus requiring arachidonic acid directly from their food - which is only found in meat. Cereal, milk and eggs don’t provide enough niacin for the feline diet, but meat does. Though thiamin is found in cereals, it is no where near as good a source as meat and cats are very susceptible to deficiency of this vitamin. Lastly, cats require at least 25% of their food intact to be protein, which is very hard to do with a vegetarian diet.

All in all, there are some very profound reasons why forcing a human idealism onto this obligate carnivore is plainly stupid, from the top down. Stupid, almost beyond belief.

Yet, there are many out there insisting that not only is the Vegan diet better for the cat, but that they live longer on it! (No study has ever been done to support this retarded claim, but they keep parroting it.)

Their real reason for this atrocious violation of nature, whether they want to admit it or not, is that they feel distress in using any products derived from industrial animal slaughter. I’m fine with that and fine with these folks taking whether steps they want to, to remove animal products from their lives. More power to you. The Rational Vegans don’t upset me any.

But forcing an obligate carnivore to follow suit, is animal cruelty in my not so humble opinion and if there is a god, I hope it one day shrinks these assholes down to mouse size, so that their companion animal can take appropriate steps toward revenge. I hope the cat plays with them a long time before the coup de grace at that.

It is one thing to take on a philosophy for your own life and take steps accordingly, but quite another to force those desires onto animals which are not designed for such. This is no less cruel than any other form of animal abuse.

My advice is simple: either give your companion animal what it truly requires in diet, or adopt another needy animal which is a natural herbivore and leave the cats to those of us who are not squeamish over their food source.

Bah! The Vegan goal is ultimately moot anyway. When you consider the millions of animals which are chewed up by combines every harvest, you haven’t avoided the blood no matter what you may fool yourself into thinking.

Or are the lives of cows more important than the lives of field mice?