Most dietary sources of taurine are meat, but you can buy vegan taurine as a supplement (both for humans if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet, but also in proper vegan cat food).
It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild and you can’t just start to feed them vegetable scraps and expect them to live.
It seems that cats fed a vegan diet tend to have better health:
It actually never definitively says that in any of the studies mentioned… This particular study relies entirely on self reported results, with less than 10% of the sample sizes being fed a vegan diet, with no actual controls in place. It’s a meaningless study. It honestly reads like a fluff piece where they collected some surveys from an already pro-vegan community. As we’ve seen from the rhetoric surrounding this situation some vegans will absolutely feed their pets inadequate food and feel good about themselves while doing it.
And the final nail in the coffin:
This research and its publication open access was funded by food awareness organisation ProVeg International (https://proveg.com).
This research and its publication open access was funded by food awareness organisation ProVeg International (https://proveg.com). AK received this award ID: Oct2019- 0000000286. However, this funder played no role in study conceptualisation, design, data collection and analysis, preparation of the resultant manuscript nor decisions relating to publication. We are grateful for their financial support.
They would have to be total fools to write anything other than that; they’re not going to admit their research has a conflict of interest. Their statement that their funding source didn’t affect their research outcomes is worth about as much as a pinkie promise.
The reason cats can’t be vegan is that they cannot produce an amino acid called taurine, which is something dogs and humans can produce (but which we also get sometimes from dietary sources).
Most dietary sources of taurine are meat, but you can buy vegan taurine as a supplement (both for humans if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet, but also in proper vegan cat food).
It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild and you can’t just start to feed them vegetable scraps and expect them to live.
It seems that cats fed a vegan diet tend to have better health:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499249/
It actually never definitively says that in any of the studies mentioned… This particular study relies entirely on self reported results, with less than 10% of the sample sizes being fed a vegan diet, with no actual controls in place. It’s a meaningless study. It honestly reads like a fluff piece where they collected some surveys from an already pro-vegan community. As we’ve seen from the rhetoric surrounding this situation some vegans will absolutely feed their pets inadequate food and feel good about themselves while doing it.
And the final nail in the coffin:
Ahhh… there it is.
FUCKING LMAO
The research you linked has a clear conflict of interest in the funding source.
Funny how you don’t even mention what that is…
They would have to be total fools to write anything other than that; they’re not going to admit their research has a conflict of interest. Their statement that their funding source didn’t affect their research outcomes is worth about as much as a pinkie promise.