They aren’t your companions, you are exploiting them for companionship. These meat eating pets can’t consent to a vegan diet, they are also not ethically required by their choice to not engage in the meat system.

That’s your choice, you are forcing that choice on an animal that isn’t getting anything from you they wouldn’t get with a non-vegan pet owner, your love isn’t special.

You could ethically choose to keep any number of naturally vegan animals. You selfishly choose to keep a cat or a dog cause you like them more.

Shit is messed up in my opinion and you buried the lead with your post. I’m glad other people were around to give context to this.

Strictly adhering to veganism correctly sees companionship animals as animal exploitation. Pets are not vegan.

From the conclusion of the paper you linked:

This review has found that there is no convincing evidence of major impacts of vegan diets on dog or cat health. There is, however, a limited number of studies investigating this question and those studies available often use small sample sizes or short feeding durations. There was also evidence of benefits for animals arising as a result of feeding them vegan diets. Much of these data were acquired from guardians via survey-type studies, but these can be subject to selection biases, as well as subjectivity around the outcomes. However, these beneficial findings were relatively consistent across several studies and should, therefore, not be disregarded.

There is an urgent need for large-scale population-based studies to further investigate this question, with a particular focus on assessing the dietary aspects cited to be of particular concern, e.g., taurine and folate. For guardians wishing to feed their pets vegan diets at the current time, based on the available evidence it is recommended that commercially produced vegan diets are used since these are less likely to lead to nutrient imbalances.

While it does support the viability of specially formulated vegan dog and cat diets based on the current research it is important not to gloss over the fact that they also stress that the current research is lacking and largely based on self-report surveys. Personally I’m not terribly swayed by this paper one way or another and wouldn’t take it as being definitive. Of course I recognize that more precise research has difficulties due to the ethics involved, but I’m also confident that we can do better.

I agree with what you say about the obsession with natural diet being weird by the way, but I think there is a reasonable disconnect in the leap from natural meat -> meat based pet food ------> no meat. For example, even if I don’t eat the same food an early homo sapien would eat I still eat the same kind of food rather than an all mineral diet or something. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t if such a thing were viable of course, just that I’d want to be very sure first.

I wrote a nice long reply and it disappeared. Here’s an abbreviated version.

Would an analysis of all current research be enough evidence? They conclude that there is no significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet.

yes, thanks, I’ll read that later.

The obsession with “natural diet” is bizarre in the first place. Are you feeding your cat small songbirds and mice, or are you feeding them dry food made with meat they never would be ankle to hunt for in the wild?

It’s not bizarre, it’s pretty intuitive. Veganism is an ethical concept, which applies to humans not animals.

This is a contentious issue for most people, and it can be hard when you are very passionate about something to look at the evidence and change your opinion.

Agreed, and using “obsession” and “bizzare” is gonna ruffle some feathers, proving your own point.

That’s not a strawman. You should review your knowledge of informal logical fallacies and be certain of their application before leveling accusations of them at people, even if you really disagree with them.

What’s your opinion about cats killing birds?

What’s your opinion about cat holders that let their cats roam outside?

What’s your opinion on cat holders that keep their cat inside all day?

Even if that was true, you’re still killing other animals which is obviously more harmful/abusive to them than not giving them their favorite food instead of the same nutrients in a different package.

That is the no true scotsman fallacy. I could also say that bringing animals into our homes when they were originally from the wild is the hypocrisy here.

yeah because they’re such cruel fucking people, those heartless vegans abusing animals lol…

look man, I get it, you have bones with the veggies and the vegans and THIS IS THE ONE PLACE where you can get some kind of moral high ground on 'em, and you really want to rub it in their faces at every opportunity.

I don’t know who those vegans even are, the vast, vast majority of vegans I know are pet owners who feed their cats and their dogs kibble. None of them are trying to ‘convert’ their pets, and none of them look at pet ownership as ‘the enslavement of an animal for the purposes of ownership’.

all y’all need to fucking calm yoselfs. jfc, get a grip.

https://theconversation.com/is-it-really-safe-to-feed-your-cat-a-vegan-diet-213356

Most of the health benefits reported for this group also did not reach statistical significance, which may be the result of simply not having enough animals in the study.

The authors reported a tendency towards positive effects of vegan diets. This means there was a general trend (which was sometimes strong), but doesn’t necessarily mean there is a very predictable relationship.

As a survey study, it’s not possible to confirm exactly what the cats were eating. Many of them went outside and may have hunted down meaty treats even while on a vegan diet. Some owners also fed their cats treats and essential nutrient supplements, so any beneficial effects (or a lack of harmful effects) may not be due to diet alone.

Another missing piece of information is how long the cats were kept on the diet. We might assume one year – but this isn’t specifically stated. This is important information since deficiency diseases can take time to develop.

Finally, any study assessing animal health will have inherent limitations if it’s designed as a survey. Pet owners usually aren’t medically trained and their “opinions” can be subjective and therefore biased.

Owners who had removed or reduced meat in their own diet were over-represented in the study. These people may already anticipate vegan diets are better for health, and this thinking could influence their responses.

It’s also worth noting the study was funded by ProVeg International – a food awareness organisation that promotes plant-based products. While this might not have impacted the validity of data, it could have influenced the stance taken when reporting on the results.

I am not convinced that depending on self-reporting of veterinary outcomes from people who are feeding their cat a vegan diet is a reliable way to structure the study

In fact, I would say that purely as a personal and anecdotal conclusion, I believe that the self reporting of an indistinguishable outcome from this study probably means that these vegan diets are harming the cats significantly, if the hidden factor of vegan-diet-feeding guardians underreporting bad outcomes were to be included.

Figure 4 shows the age distribution of tested cats. Most vegan cats have been between 1-10 years while there were many meat fed cats up to 24 years old with a general distribution towards the older ages, while vegan cats drop off sharply after 10 years.

Also there were only 127 vegan cats out of the 1378 overall cats tested. That’s not a significant data set to draw definite conclusions from, especially considering how many old meat cats they lumped into the same pot as young vegan cats. At no point in the study do they clean up for age.

I don’t trust this study at all. That’s what you base the health and wellbeing of animals on?

What were you in for? Sounds to me like someone was pinching pennies on you, since there’s nothing stopping them from including the sugars and aminos your body needs.

Or maybe they thought you were overweight or something, but I’d think that’d be malpractice.