Starvation doesn’t necessarily imply death. Like you could be emaciated from starvation in prison, but still alive.

There’s a whole book about this. Well, partly about this. Hpmor.com. Have fun. I think that part might start at chapter 66. No skip most of that, just jump to chapter 75.

Not quite but that’s the basic idea. Thanks.

Cute, needs a recent posts feed. An important thing that regular Lemmy lacks.

Very old school, directories for albums. Filenames begin with 01-, 02-, etc so they play in the right order. “Playlists” lol. A few shell scripts to play specific albums maybe with a volume adjustment.

An obligate carnivore is an animal that cannot get all the nutrients it needs from plant matter and bacteria,

No that’s wrong, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore#Obligate_carnivores , “Obligate or “true” carnivores are those whose diet in the wild requires nutrients found only in animal flesh.” The key words are “in the wild”. As I mentioned in my post that I linked, it’s quite difficult (though possible) for humans to live purely on wild plants. Vegan humans usually consume a lot of beans and grains that have to be cooked before eating, i.e. transformed to a state not found in the wild. But then they do fine. Is the same possible with cats, particularly if can you add synthetic amino acids? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s a biology question that isn’t disposed of by the words “obligate carnivore”.

Preferences aren’t that relevant. Humans by nature usually prefer beer and doughnuts over anything healthy. They have to consciously override that impulse or end up like Homer Simpson.

Also regarding evolution, cats aren’t just carnivores, they’re predators. Their natural diet is meat that was killed just moments ago. If feed them instead on canned meat that was killed months ago, you’re turning them into scavengers, not so natural. Cows and chickens, of course, didn’t evolve to live in factory farms either.

Again though whether vegan diets are good or bad for cats is completely irrelevant to the stupidity of that thread. Even if you think it came to the right answer about cat diets, a stopped clock is right twice a day. The issue is rejecting any type of careful thought or research in reaching the conclusion, not the conclusion itself.

No I don’t have a cat. We had cats when I was a kid and we fed them cat food with meat in it (the concept of vegan cat food would have been totally alien to us at that time). We didn’t underfeed them. The cats killed mice and bugs anyway. They do that, it’s called “overkill”, a biology term that describes a predator animal killing more prey than it needs to eat. As I mentioned too, the cats even tried to feed US sometimes. They occasionally brought home dead mice or birds that they dropped in front of us. I don’t think we ever ate any though.

It’s hard to tell a cat what to eat or what not to eat. I posted about that in the thread. We had cats at home when I was a kid, we fed them regular (non vegan) cat food, but they also constantly killed mice and bugs and stuff like that. Apparently domestic cats decimate bird populations, and they kill way more than they actually eat.

All of that is irrelevant though. That thread is full of people who saw the words “obligate carnivore” and immediately inferred that a cat that doesn’t eat meat will die. That’s logically and scientifically ridiculous and ignores the actual definition of an obligate carnivore. So the stupidity was unbearable. It’s fine to get into a careful dicussion about cat nutrition involving veterinarian advice and scientific studies and reach a pro or anti vegan conclusion. But saying “obligate carnivore” as a thought-stopper and having it work on the site admin just showed that the site was too messed up to engage with. Simliar debates happen on Wikipedia all the time but each side brings miles of citations to the table. I.e., they would have at least weighed actual facts instead of stopping after a slogan decided everything.

Fwiw someone in the thread said that cats require taurine (an amino acid) in their diets and that taurine isn’t found in plant sources, but that it can be synthesized. Does a plant diet with synthetic taurine supplements give a healthy cat all by itself? IDK, but it means that the topic is more complicated than “obligate carnivore, hur hur!!”.

Well, raising livestock for meat to feed to your cat doesn’t sound so natural for the meat animal either ;). But, I was less bothered by the vegan-ethics stuff in that thread than the just plain stupidity. And no it’s generally not worthwhile calling out stupidity in that type of thread, when the stupidity is coming from a hive mind. All you can do to keep your sanity is nope out.

I just re-read some of that thread and omg, the the stupidity level was overpowering. There were some earlier incidents but that one clinched it for me.

Ok, found a comment that I posted in that thread: https://lemmy.world/post/19136453/12040944

You can see the initial post too, about the rule change.

Ok I just looked there and got some chuckles. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. Anyway like they say on AO3: don’t like, don’t read.

Well you can find the actual wording, but I think it didn’t have much effect except that one discussion. The edict was issued and otherwise forgotten about.

Lemmy.world’s admin (not community mods but the actual instance admin) decreed that lemmy.world was going to be like Wikipedia, where anything controversial that you posted had to be accompanied by a research citation, more or less. The specific statement under dispute was that brand XYZ vegan cat food was ok to feed to your cat. A bunch of idiots howled “cats are obligate carnivores, hur hur! They can’t survive on a vegan diet! Mods, delete that comment!!!” and the site admin sided with the idiots. So I had to escape from the stupidity. Are you still confused? Btw the vegan cat food is perfectly fine for cats as far as I can tell. No I’m not about to go look for diffs links so some of those details may be garbled by now.

I don’t think the citation policy was ever enforced on anything else, but anything that crazy is hard to forget.

.world also defederated hexbear because it didn’t like hexbear’s politics, but I’m a regular on hexbear’s covid community (which is pretty good and not that political) so I had to go elsewhere for it. I can still reach it from .ml but this convinced me that the federation model is a failure. There’s no giant Spez overlord who can censor you, but there are 100 petty instance admins who can censor you instead. I’m still on Lemmy to stay away from Spez though.

How do you install software updates?

It’s a long story but basically after some stupid drama, lemmy.world banned discussion of cat food unless there was scientific evidence presented that the cat food was healthy for the cat. The drama had been about vegan cat food discussions in the vegan discussion group. Vegan cat food turns out to be a thing and appears to have enough approvals to be sold in pet stores, but people on .world wanting to talk about it should come over here to .ml. No I wasn’t a participant in the vegan group discussion itself. I made some posts in the surrounding drama thread that you can probably find in my .world profile from shortly after I joined.

I’m on .ml and just don’t see this. I moved here from .world after the cat food ban. The stupidity burned too much for me to stay there. I’m unsubscribed to most of the lemmy communities where the political crap is, so maybe that helps.

They’re going to be more like Apple has been all along. It’s annoying, but jeez, Android is not the whole world.