this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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FYI cats need to eat meat to stay alive.
They need an appropriate array of vitamins, nutrients, and calories to stay alive. The way they do this naturally is to eat meat, but it's not the meat specifically that they need.
you have to fortify the food but it's doable in principal. I'm assuming people are working on it by now
Why?
Because @truthfultemporarily@feddit.org heard the phrase "obligate carnivore" once and decided they didn't need to learn anything else about pet care.
They require meat proteins to live, plain and simple.
It's even law in some countries that classifies feeding cats a purely vegan diet is animal cruelty.
Proteins are chains of amino acids. There are probably proteins specific to animal muscle, but misguided legislation notwithstanding it's the amino acids that are nutritionally required, not any specific protein configuration of those animos, and you can get those from a massive array of non-animal sources.
well, there's also stuff like Taurine, so make sure you give your vegan cat some red bull from time to time
My cat and I both have a diet of just redbull and edamame.
Ah, well I guess today many of us are learning more details.
And of course law is always, strictly based of the latest available science.
taurine and arginine, to be more precise.
Taurine and arginine are amino acids, building blocks for proteins, not proteins themselves. Animo acids are quite ubiquitous across life, not specific to any one type of life. eg Plants contain both taurine and arginine.
thanks for the additional information
i remember reading that plants can't supply enough taurin. Luckily it seems easy to synthesize (that's how we have redbull &c