Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we’ve gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators’ and admins’ comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki’s actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100’s of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don’t immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We’ve also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we’ve provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin’s report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we’ve ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we’ve set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of “do no harm”.
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement “do no harm”.
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
So what would the cats choose in the wild?
It’s frankly kinda fucked and cruel to force your beliefs on an animal who has no choice in the matter. I hope you don’t actually own cats
Ok. Didn’t want to go down that route, but we already force cats to do a lot of things, like keep them indoors, give them shots, give them the same food every single day, etc. Some of those things are objectively better for the cat, and better for the small critters that cats murder en masse were cats let out, but they still aren’t what the cat would do in the wild. Many of those things are done for us, the pet owners.
It’s certainly my opinion as well that feeding a cat vegan foods is a reflection of what the owner sees themselves as, this is not for the cat, and I find it absurd. However, as we can see we have already changed many things that a cat would not necessarily choose in the wild; if one can objectively prove that vegan food for a cat, above all else, objectively will do no harm and provide the cat with adequate and correct nutrition, then there is no reason the cat cannot eat vegan food.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
See, I made sure to point out that “objective” proof would be necessary to validate the position of cats safely eating vegan food.
Y’know, evidence?
Yeah that doesnt work for you here buddy:
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
While researching another issue, I found some evidence that a vegan diet can be better than the average meat diet. This could be because the meat in pet food is of poor quality and is more likely to be spoiled than plants.
You could of course grow mice or purchase expensive meats but once it is well-rearched, a vegan diet may be a more economical way to provide a good nutrient profile.
So what would the cats choose in the wild?
Feral cats rarely live more than five years in the wild. House cats routinely live into their teenage years. Some live north of twenty.
But it’s very hard to explain this to a kitten and have it make an informed choice.
So what would the cats choose in the wild?
Canned (and cooked) tuna, mussels, shrimps, reindeer, rabbit, beef etc of course. /s
Given that pretty much everyone just buys canned pet food or kibble at the store, and most of those are made out of whatever is left over after slaughtering animals for human consumption, the whole point of “forcing your cat to eat against its natural habits” is somewhat moot.
My cat is indoor outdoor and presumably gets his share of mice as well as a mix of kibble, canned and human scraps. He’s not once gravitated to pea protein with taurine additive or whatever weird shit y’all are forcing on what is in effect a carnivore who can’t articulate their wants to you.
I was vegetarian for more than a decade, vegan for a chunk of it. I felt awful the entire time but stuck with it because I was trying to do what I thought was right. Thing is, I had a choice. Cats can’t tell you they’re listless and feel bloated all the time (the way I was during my veggie phase) which has led to full on celiac for me these days
I legit cannot think of a more on the nose allegory for “missing the first for the trees” than forcing your carnivore pet to be vegetarian. Get a guinea pig or something
You missed the point of the post.
This goes beyond the c/vegan issue; it is addressing systematic lemmy issues between admins, moderators, and users.
You know this whole thread is batshit insane when jimmydoreisalefty is actually speaking words of reason.
That’s pug Jesus. Although anyone thinking Jimmy dore is a leffy is a fucking idiot
This is not the topic at hand
Don’t be sorry about the cats, be sorry you missed the main topic of the post.
https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/
Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat. Although obligate carnivores in the wild, domestic cats still need nutrients they would normally source from prey. Thankfully Benevo Cat contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable kibble.
Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.
We’ve had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.
unnatural food
My brother in Christ, how do you think normal kibble is made?
All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.
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You might get the impression that we are lol
A vegan bot; now I’ve seen it all.
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Because those are normal people. “Lifestyle” communities on the internet invariably devolve into groupthink cesspits of the most unhinged followers of that lifestyle.
Veganism is the worst. It’s like the terminally online crazies can telepathically detect anyone discussing veganism and descend en-mass.
Why not a good pair of sneakers? All the sneakers I usually look for are just made of synthetic materials AFAIK
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse
I really don’t get this point. With the same logic, you can remove any person giving meat to their cat, or more generally, eating meat themselves. No matter how much most people try to ignore it and not think about it, the absolute overwhelming majority of meat is produced in absolutely cruel and gruesome circumstances, which every pet owner would consider torture.
(Edit: And for the record, I’m not even vegan myself (and also don’t own a cat), just calling out the hypocrisy.)
it’s like saying don’t have sex anymore 'cause porn is abuse.
if something is not consented to, then yes.
Yeah I don’t get it at all.
Like seriously “animal abuse”? Maybe it is, but I’d waaay rather be a cat on a vegan diet than say… a chicken that makes the eggs I like to eat, or the KFC I enjoy so much.
Guaranteed, plenty of cats eating a vegan diet are having their nutritional needs met more satisfactorily than plenty of cats that are fed other commercial cat foods, or strays, or cats in the wild.
It’s about as “abusive” as using a laser pointer to play with your cat. A behaviour I personally find repugnant, but one enjoyed by cat owners the world over.
You can call it cat abuse if you want, but honestly on the spectrum of things that are worth censoring this barely rates a mention.
I was just quoting the post / admin and responding to that. I think your comment is not directed to me.
Correct.
It’s about as “abusive” as using a laser pointer to play with your cat. A behaviour I personally find repugnant, but one enjoyed by cat owners the world over.
I’m curious, why do you fund it repugnant?
Because I don’t think it’s a “fun game” for the cat.
I’ve seen some animals become obsessed with lights and reflections for life, after “playing” with the laser.
Interesting. I never thought about it that way.
Do they get depressed when they can’t “catch” the dot? I’ve heard that can be an issue with long term usage. I don’t know if it’s true though.
No, it’s more than that. Like PTSD or something.
There’s nothing repugnant about using laser pointers safely and properly. It can cause distress if you don’t turn the pointer off on a toy they can “catch,” so that way they satisfy their hunting instinct. Oh and bviously don’t shine it in their eyes. But if owners are doing that, it’s a perfectly ethical toy.
Fucking vegan cat killer assholes
@lwadmin For full disclosure I agree with rooki on this topic.
I may have missed it in the write up but I think the vegan mods needlessly escalated the situation by trying to ban and remove comments from an admin.
I am not saying I always agree with rooki but I respect his job as an admin.
The mods of vegan treated him disrespectfully in his capacity as an admin by deleting and banning him.
You should cover this in your terms of service.
The mods acted disrespectfully? The admins admitted they were in the wrong; it was the mods on the receiving end of this. People in positions of authority should be able to deescalate things. That’s not what happened. People in positions of authority should not be able to use “They disrespected me” as a reason to escalate. If you think that sentence applies to mods but not admins, you’ve got a really dissonant way of looking at things.
The mods deleted the admins comment and tried to ban him from the community. That’s a no no in my book.
If the mods felt rooki was wrong, they shouldn’t have tried to display a power trip with their actions. They should have escalated to other admins.
Rooki deescalated by removing them as mods. That stopped their childish behavior.
Rooki deescalated
If that’s your definition of deescalating, you’re either disingenuous or an idiot. Enter way, you’re not worth further attention. I would suggest you actually look up deescalation so it’s not so obvious next time in either case p
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse
The comments have been restored
What… So the rules don’t matter if enough people get angry, I see
cats can live on a vegan diet. so it’s hardly animal abuse.
Well in germany you would get up to 3 years prison time for trying that bullshit. because it absolutely is animal abuse. quote the The German Veterinary Association for Animal Welfare
"A strictly vegan cat diet [would] be tantamount to an unauthorized, uncontrolled animal experiment and violates § 3 No. 10 of the Animal Welfare Act "
“Force-feeding for the purpose of an ideologically justified change of diet to vegetarian rations is a violation of § 3 No. of the Animal Welfare Act”
cheery picking laws aside, if the food provides all the necessary nutrition and the cat enjoys it, then I see no issue.
cheery picking laws aside
That would imply there was “cherry” picking to be set aside.
cherry picking in this case would imply picking only the law(s) that supports the bias of the poster, to the exclusion of other laws that contradict this position.
I’d be interested in seeing the contradicting laws you think would make this cherry picking, do you have any links ?
Do you have proof of that being the case or are you just throwing stuff out there?
Ima throw your own words back at you.
You are cherry picking the few favorable studies over the heaps of unfavorable studies.
You asked for peer reviewed studies into the palatability and nutrition of vegan cat food.
I provided.
show me some unfavourable ones then
how about this meta study?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/
there are few studies at the moment. however, it does appear to be bad for cats.
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I don’t have a cat. But I do support reducing animal.abusr where possible.
Surely you can agree with that?
But are they actually healthy and happy?
if the food is palatable and nutritious one would image that they are.
Is the food palatable and nutritious?
there are ways to measure both.
What are the results of those measurements?
that the food is enjoyable.
regular.biscuits given to cats contain a lot of artificial flavours and vegetable matter already.
Let’s see it.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253292
here is one study.
let me know what you think
Yes.
It’s a confusing post. Rooki justified the actions by citing “missinformation”, though the ToS had no such rule at the time. I think they’re trying to rewrite history now by bringing up animal abuse, but MrKaplan’s explanation in the comments is that if there were no healthy implementation of vegan cat food, then they treat it as animal abuse. From having looked at the research, even Rooki weakly admitted that “it’s not unhealthy”, hence the reversal.
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Totally missing the point of the thread. Read the room, dude.
They are for genocide so not surprising they can’t read a room
people really hate getting pointed out when pro genocide
To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.
I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.
Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit’s Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.
And before you tell me this guy’s figures were legit, aren’t we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.
In my area there is a dog which has been fed a vegan diet for almost ten years now. So they definitely can survive on it. Said is healthy.
Dogs are omnivores like us and can do fine on a plant based diet. Sometimes even recommended for health reasons for dogs with anal gland issues.
Cats are a bit more complex but require taurine. Modern mass produced cat food is supplemented with synthetic taurine anyway so there isn’t much difference.
Humans can survive on a vegan diet because it’s 2024 and we have scientific research and guidelines/help. I don’t think it would have been possible for most humans throughout history
It’s 2024 and folks with no clue continue to make false claims online. Billions of humans have lived and died, never eating meat in their lifetime. Do you think mass produced meat has always existed?
Humans didn’t become the smartest ape on earth by eating veggies. I say that as a vegetarian
Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude
I’m glad you’re sticking to your guns on this. At the end of the day, it should NOT be up to the admin team who are not subject matter experts to determine what is and is not considered “truth” especially in cases where there is still active research on the topic.
I also can totally see how this topic can elicit a knee jerk reaction, because people have been known to put animals on vegan diets irresponsibly, but we don’t block people from posting “chonkers” or obese cats which is literally the same thing where people will often intentionally overfeed their cats for this aesthetic which is also clearly abuse in the exact same vein.
I also think its a good thing you reinstated the admin after some reflection and a well thought out response and statement. It doesn’t seem like they are on some crazy power trip either.
❤️
Rooki has never been removed from the position or paused activity. You’re probably thinking of the !vegan mods first demoted, then reinstated by Rooki after my post asking for his removal as a moderator.
By the way, instance moderator MrKaplan said that it would be considered animal abuse if vegan cat food were inherently unhealthy, so by that logic, the overfed cat posts would also need to be removed, but I don’t see that happening. The Lemmy.World mods are very selective about applying and interpreting the rules.
Thanks! We do our best to learn and grow when conflicts arise.
All of that was over people fighting about feeding a carnivore pet plant based pet food? You’re f*cking kidding me right?
I propose to conduct following experiment: we close a cat with juicy beef steak and juicy lettuce. We remove the owner and all people from that room: we only watch that cat with cameras. Guess what will be eaten :-)?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eG2IPRr--nM
I think cats will be even more on the side of real food in the real food vs salad debacle, animal edition ™.
There were many papers on the feral cats stomach content. Small mammals, small rodents and even small birds sometimes. Not much of floral content. On the other side, they did research on wolves diet and actually they found traces of wild plants like blueberries. Of course it was just an apperitive to get celuloza content to easy removal of excrement. Cats’ poops are usually much drier than the dog ones, so even that suggests their culinary preferences
P.S. I added link for wolves https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/talking-wolves-diets-u-m
Huh that’s an interesting experiment. What if we put a baby in the room and give them broccoli or a chocolate bar.
Guess what will be eaten :-)?
None, most babies needs to be fed manually
My bad, brother. A toddler. Do you understand the analogy?
Then who will they tell they’re vegan?
In my experience vegans never tell others out of the blue they’re vegan. Most of the time they get interrogated about their nutritional intakes or about if they dared to inconvenience others around them
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I’m doing animal abuse, don’t worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I’m not abusing them.
Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about “animal abuse” when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that’s part of their “natural diet?”
I don’t have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It’s simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don’t even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I’m doing animal abuse, don’t worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I’m not abusing them.
Thats canibalism if you would do that. And already reading that gives me some worries how you would treat your cats.
I don’t have any cats or other pets
Huh didnt you beginn the whole comment by telling you “have bunch of cats”?
And this comment is just a “Not my opinion = Bad” vibe. I think you are just here to rant about how bad other (non-vegan) people are and make everyone feel like they are lower than you.
“Not my opinion = bad”? As opposed to the vegan bad circle jerks you spawned with two separate stickied posts due to your emotional outbursts that the entire admin team has allowed to fester? You’re right, vegans are definitely the problem.
Then I can’t imagine what kind of worries reading Jonathan Swift would give you.
Huh didnt you beginn the whole comment by telling you “have bunch of cats”?
Woosh.
you missed the point entirely
Missed the joke lol.
I missed then when it was funny.
But here is something funny:
Bravo. Well said.
We’re not talking about cows - don’t change topic please. I never heard of such thing even though I used to live countryside and have farmers in family
We’re not talking about cows - don’t change topic please.
Are we not? Because beef goes into cat food. If people are calling others animal abusers, and their solution involves abusing different animals, then I think that’s relevant to the discussion. But if you want to keep it just about cats, ok, we can take cat food off the table and discuss the ethics of killing some cats to feed others.
I never heard of such thing even though I used to live countryside and have farmers in family
Then you’ve learned something new today, and you’re welcome.
Your logic is impeccable. There are always some unscrupulous farmers but you say they are all of them. That indeed ends this conversation
Unscrupulous? It’s totally legal, at least in the US. Actually, looking it up, it seems to be illegal in Canada, which might be why you haven’t heard of the practice, it’s quite common here in the states. As the article states, the FDA estimates 1 to 2 million tons of “poultry litter” are fed to cows annually. If you want to call US cattle ranchers unscrupulous, well, I certainly wouldn’t disagree with you, but it’s not like they’re hiding it or anything.
Americans still belive that USA is everywhere. Greetings from Europe and luckily lots of your food is banned. And besides I’m wondering how american farmers feed cows with the feces. Cows after all are not that stupid and they would rather graze the grass
Hi, Europe! Four years ago, Denmark systematically killed 2.84 minks for every one person living in Denmark.
Oh, and how’s that whole banning live exports thing going? Not at all? Cool!
How is it connected with vegan diet for cats or let’s be laxed - feces in cows feed. I wish to know
Just because certain practices aren’t universal doesn’t mean that they’re irrelevant to the discussion. I brought it up because it’s a particularly on point example of the double standard of what people consider to be animal abuse - feeding cats vegan cat food is abuse, but feeding cows poop isn’t, somehow.
My general point is that it’s hypocritical to call something animal abuse when the proposed alternative involves abuse towards other animals, and that point stands regardless of that particular example only being relevant in the US.
I thought the whole point of lemmy is you cash be as crazy as you want and they will leave you alone unlike reddit
Or just leave for another instance, which is much easier that running your own instance
Unless it’s biased information that has real world consequences.
