Vegans wanting to extend their ethics to every domain under their control often rear their dogs and cats as little furry meat abstainers. Some call this cruelty to animals (a charge that is sometimes undermined by the accusers’ support of factory farming), but if imposing a vegan diet on someone is a form of cruelty, it’s at least a cruelty that vegans are willing to foist upon themselves. Vegans have good reason to fill their omnivorous dogs and carnivorous cats with animal-free kibble: it’s the only way for them to be relatively consistent with their ethics. It’s vegans feeding their rescue pets carcass who open up a vicious anti-vegan loophole.
“If wild animals get to eat other animals, why can’t humans?” is a stock question that vegans get a lot, and seasoned veggie apologists have their retorts ready. Unless they are obsessed with suffering reduction, most vegans are happy to wash their hands of what animals do to each other when humans aren’t looking. Wild creatures don’t live by complex ethical frameworks, so no ethics are breached when a porpoise eats a fish. As long as humans aren’t involved, what happens in nature stays in nature.
Also relevant, vegans say, is that humans have tamed the land to produce vegetables, fruits and grains, somewhat at our whim, making it possible for us to live without eating meat. Eating meat becomes cruel the exact moment it is possible to survive without it. Wild animals, who lack the intelligence and opposable digits required to plant, harvest and write out ethical screeds, can’t be blamed for eating meat; they have no choice.
But a variation of this question can highlight the culpability of (some) vegans in a scenario that hits closer to home. Something like: “If you don’t have a problem with buying meat for your pets, why do you have a problem with me buying meat for myself?”
With non-vegan pets, it’s not an issue of animals eating animals outside the bounds of human civilization. Dogs and cats may not know how to plant and harvest, but their vegan owners should know how to read labels and look for that green V on pet food labels. Yet vegans –- who are against humans eating animals –- are sometimes complicit in feeding animals to each other. How do they defend this?
It’s no good to say simply that cats are carnivores and dogs are omnivores and that’s why it’s okay to feed them meat. That’s the naturalistic fallacy, a fallacy that vegans call out whenever humans say that they eat meat because they are omnivores. Most vegans know they have to do better than this.
Some vegans might say that it doesn’t make sense to impose vegan beliefs on animals who don’t know what veganism is and can’t reap the psychological rewards of it. Vegan dogs and cats are forced to make the same sacrifice as vegan humans without reaping one of the few selfish benefits that veganism offers – the pleasure of being ethical.
This, however, is the same argument that meat eaters make against vegans raising babies and toddlers without animal parts. And vegans have an easy answer for this: babies are helpless and under our care and any way we decide to raise them will be imposing some kind of belief on them. Vegans may be imposing vegan ethics on their babies, but meat eaters are just as surely imposing their (perhaps unconsciously-accepted) carnist philosophy on their own spawns. To say that humans must be raised on omnivorous diets because humans are categorized as omnivores is a belief, as is the vegan supposition that humans do not need to be raised on omnivorous diets even though they are omnivores.
Vegans who feed their dogs and cats meat are endorsing carnism for their pets (and the other animals who must die for them) rather than veganism.
Besides, vegans who shield their dogs and cats from the temptations of flesh aren’t necessarily imposing ethics on their pets so much as imposing ethics on themselves. The goal of vegan pet owners seems to be less about purity for their pets and more about not undercutting their own veganism. If they purchased meat for their pets, they would be contributing directly to the meat industry, and isn’t the whole point of veganism not to do that?
Vegans who do buy canned meat for their cats or dogs clearly don’t object to directly funding the meat industry per se. Their objection to buying meat, then, has to be based on the kind of product being purchased, or the circumstances of the being for whom the meat is purchased.
It’s unlikely to be the former, because that would mean that vegans with non-vegan pets are okay with anyone buying meat for themselves, as long as it’s the sort of meat you might find marketed to pets: euthanized cats and dogs, organ meats, odd cuts and other spare or unpopular animal bits. When I purchase meat for myself, this is the sort of stuff I tend to buy (excluding the euthanized cats and dogs). Vegans with pets who eat meat either have to say that this is okay, or they need to focus on the differences between humans and their companion animals, and why these make it appropriate for vegans to buy meat for their dogs or cats, but ask humans not to do the same for themselves.
The strongest argument I can think of for vegans with non-vegan pets would go like this: “My understanding is that humans can thrive – and might even be healthier – on a diet with no animal products. If it turned out that this wasn’t true, I would start eating animal products again and wouldn’t begrudge other people doing the same. My understanding is also that cats and maybe dogs do not thrive on a diet with no animal products. If I found out that I was wrong about this, I would feed my pets a vegan diet. For now, I don’t want to risk their health to be consistent with my ideology, so I am feeding them what I believe to be the most suitable diet for them.”
The basic idea is that for humans, meat is an expendable luxury that we only consume for reasons of taste, tradition, habit and convenience, while meat is vital for the health of cats and maybe dogs. The (former) American Dietetic Association says that a vegan diet is appropriate for all stages of the human lifecycle, but neglects to mention how Fido and Patches fare.
What it comes down to for these vegans is that cats and maybe need meat, and humans don’t.
But need meat for what? To be as happy as possible? There are plenty of meat-loving humans who could testify that they need meat to have as good a life as they can possibly have. Many could even say their livelihoods depend on making, serving or eating meat.
To survive? It can’t be this, since vegan food isn’t known to kill dogs and cats on the spot, and many vegan pets have long, apparently healthy lives. True, some eventually develop complications that could be due to a vegan diet and die earlier than they otherwise would have, but even they manage to survive as vegans for a while. So then are vegans who feed meat to their pets saying that their aspiration is to give their pets the diet that makes them live as long as they possibly can? If so, this would mean that any studies indicating that pescetarian humans live longer than vegan humans (or any other study indicating that veganism isn’t the healthiest possible diet) give ethical license for humans to eat at least some animal products.
Anyway, if the goal of vegans with meat-eating pets is to provide the healthiest food they can offer, they’re falling short by giving them canned meats. At least for cats, the healthiest diet seems to be a raw meat diet that includes bones and possibly a supplement.
It could be, then, that these vegans aren’t saying they want to give their pets the healthiest diet conceivable, but that they want to give their pets a reasonably healthy diet, and they think vegan kibble falls short of even that more modest goal. Sounds rational enough, but when vegans feed their dogs or cats meat because they don’t trust supplemented vegan pellets to fully nourish them, they are implying one of two possible failings that could tarnish veganism overall.
One of the possible implications is that there is more to satisfactory nutrition than eating plant products and supplementing for the missing nutrients. Yes, cats cannot last long without taurine, calcium and thiamin, but that’s why vegan cat food is supplemented with them. Why isn’t this good enough?
Surely these vegans don’t want to say that there is some vital aspect to eating meat that can’t be artificially replicated by mixing amino acids and vitamins and minerals in grain pellets. Because if there’s some special attribute about a meat-inclusive diet that a purely vegan diet can never have, that could suggest that having a well-planned vegan diet and taking B12, essential fatty acids, zinc and calcium pills may not be adequate for omnivorous humans.
What these vegans might prefer to say is that humans are omnivores, which means we can digest just about any plant or animal, but cats are obligate carnivores, which means they have to eat only meat. But this is too literal a reading of these taxonomic classifications. Just as this herbivorous deer and cow can eat meat, carnivorous cats can certainly eat plants. Even specialized diabetic dry cat food has cereals in it.
The other possible implication of vegans saying that vegan cat and dog food isn’t good enough is that supplementation is theoretically fine, but nutrition science is too young for us to know everything that must be supplemented to keep vegan pets healthy.
But if we don’t know enough about feline and canine nutrition to supplement everything vegan cats and dogs might be missing, why do vegans think we know enough about human nutrition to expect humans to be vegan and fill the holes with all the right pills?
I suspect that vegans with meat-eating pets would respond to this by re-emphasizing that most humans are just fine on a vegan diet, but veganism may prove ruinous for dogs and especially cats; meat is nothing but a frivolous flavor transmitter for humans and a vital necessity for the most basic well-being for pets, and it is their responsibility not to send their trusting companions to an early grave.
However, this dichotomy overplays how badly many cats and dogs need animal products, and underplays the difficulties of many humans who go animal-free.
In Obligate Carnivore, Jed Gillen argued that vegan cats are sometimes healthier than carnivorous cats because meat-based pet food often contains the poisonous remains of euthanized dogs and cats. And in the article “Can My Cat Be Healthy on a Vegan Diet?”, Armaiti May describes the potential challenges of raising cats as vegans, but thinks it can be done. She suggests monitoring vegan cats’ urine to make sure it stays acidic enough so that the cats don’t develop urinary crystals (though female cats can usually pass these without pain), and recommends plants that can be added to a vegan cat’s diet to lower their urine pH.
Raising a healthy vegan cat sounds like a hassle, but since vegans think convenience is not a good reason for humans to eat meat, it’s hard to see why convenience should be a reason for them to feed their cats meat.
Nevertheless, it’s uncontroversial to say that cats are usually healthier eating animal products than supplemented corn discs, and that putting companion animals on a vegan diet may be risking their health. And given these facts, it’s not unreasonable for vegans to choose to do the most responsible thing for the animals under their care by feeding them other animals.
But this doesn’t get vegans with non-vegan pets entirely off the hook. For one thing, it raises the question of why vegans rescue pets from shelters in the first place, when they know they’ll be sustaining them with the corpses of other animals.
They certainly can’t claim that they are doing so in order to save animal lives. Now, it could make sense for meat-eating speciesists to consider only the heroism of saving a cat when they adopt a rescue, since they don’t put as much value on farm animal lives, so it’s easy for them to overlook that other animals are now going to have to die to sustain the cat who was just about to be put down. But for a vegan who believes that lions and lambs have an equal interest in living, the act of saving a shelter cat whom they plan on feeding meat is a selfish one. They know that other animals will have to die for their own more favored animal, but they save the carnivore anyway.
At least meat-eating humans didn’t ask to be born and grow up to be people who feel they need to eat animal products to maintain a good quality of life. Vegans who save shelter dogs and cats and then feed them meat, on the other hand, are essentially securing the release of an unrepentant serial killer on death row and then agreeing to collaborate with them on future killings. Meat eaters kill for the pleasure of taste and nourishment. Vegans with meat-eating pets kill for the pleasure of having a warm, cuddly carnivore purring at their feet.
It seems like it would be fair to say that humans could just not get a cat and then eat the amount of meat they would have fed the cat. Or — since vegans with meat-eating pets don’t say there is a limit to how many meat-eating pets they are allowed to rescue — couldn’t I get one cat instead of eight cats, and then eat the amount of animals I would have killed for the other seven?
An easy way around this problem would be for vegans to feed their pets only freegan meat. Butchers and fish mongers can often sell or give you scraps of meat that will otherwise be thrown out, such as odd cuts of liver, kidney and heart, fish guts, bones and lamb lungs. Most dogs and cats could be happy and healthy on a well-planned freegan diet (though you would have to be careful not to feed them a diet too rich in organs), and at no additional cost to other animals. Why don’t all vegans with non-vegan pets do this?
I suspect that it’s either convenience (which, again, would be scandalous since vegans disparage humans for eating meat out of convenience), thoughtlessness or queasiness at handling the body parts of other animals.
No matter the reasoning, when vegans feed the bodies of other animals to their cats and dogs without taking freegan precautions, their actions say that the quality of life of the animals under their care is more important than the lives of animals they don’t know.
Which is good news for humans, since each of us is an animal under our own care, and many of us benefit from having animal products in our lives.
The “fuck it, I’m going to do what’s best for my pets,” resolution some vegans must have after overcoming their reservations and deciding to feed their dogs and cats a meat-based diet is not much different than the “fuck it, I’m going to do what’s best for myself” epiphany many ex-vegans have upon deciding to eat meat again.
So why are many vegans giving their dogs and cats better treatment than they expect us to give ourselves?
