The argument is that breeding more animals for the enjoyment of humans is bad, but the existing animals should be given as good of a life as we can. Since rescuing does not directly support the breeders, some vegans are OK with rescuing to give these animals a better life. Some vegans use similar logic to thrift wool sweaters for yarn, when they would not support buying new wool.

Taurine is usually singled or because it is the only nutrient required to meet the AACFO cat food guidelines that can not be readily sourced directly from plants.

Did you read the study they linked and really think that what you posted was the same kind of thing?

From your source:

There are some commercial vegan diets available which have synthetically made nutrients to replace those found only in animal based ingredients.

The discussion is about commercial vegan cat food, which had the nutrients cats need, just sourced without killing other animals. The science on these diets is still relatively new, but early studies are looking pretty good.

Hey thanks for reading the analysis!

I just have a couple points:

The specific study you are referencing in the first 3 quotes is this one. In this study, cats were fed a “human vegetarian” diet. It was not cat food supplemented with more protein, it was casserole mince. The issue isn’t that taurine suppliments don’t work, it’s that those cats didn’t ge any taurine. From the remaining studies in the analysis, cats did not have any issue with taurine on a diet of commercial vegan cat food.

For your last quote, the study they referenced is unfortunately behind a paywall. I do know it was a case study of only 2 cats, while there are other studies with a much larger sample size.

In the future, if you see the same citation used over and over in an article like this, is usually a good idea to go and read it. It will make your time understanding the rest of the article much easier.

I’m going to end with a quite from the publishers of this article that sums it up pretty well for me:

This review has found that there is no convincing evidence of major impacts of vegan diets on dog or cat health.

I’m happy to do research. Care to post some academic literature on the subject?

Taurine is an essential amino acid for cats that is present in animal products. During the manufacturing process of cat food, it is heated to high temperature and some odds this natural taurine is destroyed. To make up for this, synthetic taurine is added back in. This synthetic taurine is made in a lab, and (from wikipedia) in 1993, 5000-6000 tonnes were produced.

If you have any more questions, or any studies or other academic sources I should look at, please don’t hesitate to post them.

Happy to see someone who read through the analysis! I just looked back at your criticism and you make stone goods points. I did notice that almost all the negative effects are coming from the same citation in the study, so I looked into the study they are citing there. Here’s a link to the PDF of that study.

The main take away for me from this study is that they were feeding the cats a “vegetarian human diet,” specifically casserole mince along with a couple others. Feeding these cats a diet designed for humans is obviously bad, but it doesn’t speak to commercial food designed for cats. You can use this to say that a homemade vegan diet is not good for cats. I’ve always said, don’t do a homemade diet for your pets.

There were also negative outcomes from citation 30, but the full text is behind a paywall, so I can’t really check on it. Of anyone has a copy I’d love to read it.

The studies that did use commercially available cat foods (literally all the other studies linked) found that the cats fed a vegan diet were within the range for regular healthy cats.

I am not making the claim that vegan diet is healthier. I am not claiming that you can make your own cat food at home. My specific claim is that there is not a statistically significant difference in the health of cats that eat commercially available vegan cat food. If you have a similar quality study to the contrary, please post it. Until that happens, I’m going to stick with the researchers who published the study, when they say:

Perhaps a take-home message is that use of commercially prepared vegan pet foods appear to be safe for use in cats and dogs but further research is needed.

For the record, science disagrees with you. According to an analysis of all current research, there is no statistically significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet. Of there is a similarly high quality study that finds that a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet is worse for cats I would love to see it.

The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.

People often use the obligate carnivore excuse, but use it in an unscientific way. Obligate carnivores have nutritional needs that can only be meet through meat in the wild, but humans are perfectly capable of manufacturing these nutrients. We are so good at it that we supplement these synthetic nutrients in meat based cat food already.

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. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.

I would love to have more research done into these diets. I totally understand not being fully convinced by the currently available studies, I get a bit annoyed when other commenters say is scientifically impossible without doing any research into it. For me personally, the available studies are convincing enough that I would want to hear of a reason that cats are not able to get the nutrients they need from the specially designed kibble.

I can agree that there is a pretty big jump in the differences from meat based to plant based food for wet food, but the jump seems smaller to me for dry food. My understanding is that with dry food, most of the meat flavour and some of the nutrients are lost in the processing of the food, and they have to suppliment the lost nutrients and spray a flavouring agent on to make it appealing to cats.

I think we all just wasn’t what’s best for our cats. I think that a the moment meat is cheaper, more easily available, and better researched than the plant based diets and I totally understand going for that option

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.

The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.

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?

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. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.

No matter what you feed you’re cat, you are forcing a diet on them. They need certain nutrients, which I am providing them. They like the food. I don’t see the issue with giving my cat nutritionally complete food that they like.

It’s OK of you would rather feed you’re cat something else, but I haven’t yet seen a compelling reason not to use the nutritionally complete vegan food. We have different opinions and priorities and that’s that.

Science says that creatures of all types need nutrients, not ingredients. That’s why the more scientifically minded sources you have linked don’t say outright that vegan cat food is impossible, they point out specific nutrients that may be hard to source in vegan foods.

The other articles seem obsessed with the idea that vegans are going to feed their cat a carrot and some broccoli, which is obviously wrong and inadequate. I’d like to compare like to like, so let’s look at what most people feed their cats, dry kibble.

One of the main important nutrients that is present in meat and not plants is taurine. Some of the taurine in meat is destroyed when it is cooked, so they suppliment the meat with synthetic taurine. Both types of kibble have synthetic taurine, and this taurine had been studied extensively and is the same as the naturally occurring stuff.

A lot of these articles say a vegan diet is unnatural for cats and thus wrong. Your linked article on cats.com brings up a good point that cats whole lives as pets is unnatural. Cats natural habitat is in the wild, eating only what they catch when they catch it. Eating kibble or wet food on a schedule in a house is completely unnatural regardless of the makeup of that kibble. The makeup of the meat kibble is also not a cats natural diet, they would be eating small birds and rodents, not tuna and salmon.

If you have a scientific article that says otherwise is be happy to hear it. I’m happy to say that a meat based diet will be easier and simpler to give your cat, but science doesn’t agree that meat is strictly necessary

Posting the same link to the ASPCA isn’t as compelling as you think it is. They don’t touch on synthetic taurine at all, even though it’s used in most commercial pet foods. Did they just forget?

I completely agree that a whole food vegan diet is terrible for cats, which is why cat foods are supplimented with the necessary nutrients. Your Blue Cross link agrees with me, where they say:

These needs cannot be met by a vegan diet without synthetic supplements.

These synthetic suppliments are the while reason vegan cat food is possible. I’m not sure why the ASPCA is just ignoring the existence of synthetic taurine. Is there some issue with synthetic taurine that only the ASPCA knows about?

The issues brought up in all the articles boil down to unprocessed plants having low levels of necessary nutrients, but the plants are processed to extract these nutrients to bring them to acceptable levels.

There are definitely issues with vegan cat foods, but to put a blanket statement that they are not possible requires a bit better evidence than one group saying so, without acknowledging the key ingredient that makes vegan cat foods feasible.

I’m not all that interested in arguing beyond this point either. Your appeals to authority are unconvincing when the authority disagrees with you, or when they neglect to mention the primary counterpoint to their argument.

Cats can absolutely live on a vegan diet. Cats, like all animals, need specific nutrients rather than specific ingredients Source. The source you provided pointed out 3 specific nutrients to be concerned about, so let’s go through them.

Taurine is the first, and most obvious nutrient to focus on. I’m the natural environment, it is only available in animal sources. Thankfully, we do not live in the natural works, and we have developed ways to synthesise taurine. This is very important because the processing on commercial cat foods remove taurine from the meat they use Source. We can use this synthetic taurine to make cat food that doesn’t need to harm other animals to make.

Next up is protein. Cats have a short digestive system that is specialised for digesting protein and fat. Thankfully, we humans also need protein, so we have figured or some very good ways to extract protein from various sources and concentrate it. The dry cat food I use is 32% protein, and is sourced from fungus. It has the same amino acid profile as chicken. I have seen meat based dry food with more protein, but from my research 32% is pretty decent. I have seen some meat based cat food with less.

Then, carbohydrates. They are not good for cats in general. As far as I’ve seen with commercial cat food, the cheap stuff is full of filler carbs and the more expensive stuff had higher protein and fat content. This trend follows for vegan cat foods, so be sure to check the label.

Like I said before, there are commercially available vegan cat foods that are suitable to feeding your cat. There is also vegan cat foods that is no good, so it’s important to do the research to make sure you get something good. I think we can agree that homemade vegan diets for cats are an extremely bad idea for the reasons mentioned in the article you mentioned. Cat nutrition is too complicated to be trying to make at home.

If there is some other factor I haven’t considered please let me know. I’m just trying to do what I can for my cat and morals.

Cats can thrive on a vegan diet. The only thing that they can’t get directly from plants is taurine, but synthetic taurine is extremely common and well studied (most non-vegan cat food is supplimented with synthetic taurine).

There are some scammy and not nutritionally complete vegan cat foods or there, so it’s important to do a bit of extra research, but there are also some excellent offerings that have everything a cat needs to thrive.

Cook serve delicious 3?!

Very fun and hectic

What’s with the obsession with synthetic fabric? Cotton and linen make perfectly fine clothes without supporting the oil and gas industry or factory farming

What’s with the obsession with synthetic fabric? Cotton and linen make perfectly fine clothes without supporting the oil and gas industry or factory farming

Sorry that doesn’t actually prove that a vegan diet is significantly more difficult to get complete nutrition than a non-vegan diet.

The two mentioned in the block you quoted (calcium and iodine) are often deficient in non-vegan diets as well. According to this analysis only 6 countries in the world meet the daily recommended 1000 mg of calcium per day. Calcium is also present in the easiest changes you can make to your diet (vegan milk in place of cow milk and tofu as a protein). Iodine is difficult to get for any diet, which is why so many jurisdictions put it in salt. It is also usually present in vegan milk.

Regardless, non-vegans tend to be deficient in a totally different subset of nutrients. Both diets need attention in order to get optimal nutrition. On a vegan diet, you need a source of B12, omega 3, and calcium. Most of the other nutrients are covered by commonly fortified foods or are very easy to keep in mind. Non-vegan diets you need to watch for fibre, vitamin D, vitamin E, potassium, magnesium, avoid too much cholesterol, sodium, red meat, and mercury from fish.

Regardless of the diet you choose, you need to put more thought in than the average person in order to have optimal nutrition. Using nutrition to discredit veganism doesn’t work