Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
The idea of Obligate Carnivore is fully lost on some. And that’s quite a sad reality.
It seems to me that a lot of people are using that term without knowing what it means. That, too, is a sad reality. It means that cats in the wild aren’t able to live off non-meat sources that they can find there, similar to how humans can’t live in subfreezing temperatures without shelter or clothing. It says nothing about whether their dietary needs can be fulfilled without meat in a domestic environment. Maybe yes, maybe no, but you can’t just parrot the words “obligate carnivore” like a Fox News anchor and act like that gives you the answer. The world is more complicated than that.
In fact, based on other info, cats do seem to be able to survive on human-supplied vegan diets, but it’s less clear that they can enjoy optimal health on such a diet. So the reality seems to be somewhat shaded.
Even for humans, being a well-nourished vegan is somewhat difficult (you have to pay attention to stuff like protein combination). It’s even harder to be a so-called “raw vegan” (living entirely from uncooked vegetables such as in salads) but apparently it can still be done. Most human vegans consume a lot of beans and grains that are inedible without cooking.
You can imagine an animal species for which cooked beans and grains would be a completely healthy diet, and yet that diet is never seen in the wild because wild animals don’t cook. Thus they would get their protein instead from animal sources, i.e. be obligate carnivores, even though they would be fine on steamed rice and tofu. There is no logical incompatibility between “obligate carnivore” and “vegan diet”. It’s a question of biology that is species specific. In the limit, you could inagine a Star Trek replicator synthesizing perfect mouse meat from pure carbon and other elements, giving you a completely healthy and satisfied vegan cat that thinks it is eating freshly killed mice.
It doesn’t appear possible for humans to stay healthy for long periods as fruitarians (some people don’t want to cut or kill living plants for food, but instead live off of fruits and nuts that have naturally fallen off the plants). But that can only be known through experimental observation, not linguistic knee jerks. You have to examine the details to understand the real situation for any particular species, food type, and preparation method
Obligate and facultative carnivores. Don’t forget the dogs.
“feculate carnivore” returns no results on google. Oblate carnivore returns results for obligate carnivores, looks to be that obligate/oblate is used interchangeably?
I haven’t heard either of these terms as a native English speaker. Perhaps they are regional terms, or terms from another language?
Obligate and facultative. Thanks for correcting me.
Facultative means optionally in response to circumstance.
Facultative carnivore, a carnivore that does not depend solely on animal flesh for food but also can subsist on non-animal food.
Yes, they will optionally eat non-meat in response to circumstance but their diet consist largely of meat and they will choose meat when it is available.
Oh, I was just suggesting the correct word as you said fecultative and I don’t think that’s a thing.
Dogs are facultative carnivores. Cats are obligate carnivores. Dogs are more opportunistic and flexible than cats.
You mean fAcultative. I think whatever you are typing on is autocorrecting to fEcultative.
Sure, explain it to me. What is it that a cat can’t get from non-meat sources?
Unlike omnivores, cats are unable to synthesize arginine, taurine, methionine and cystine, arachidonic acid, niacin, pyridoxine, vitamin A and vitamin D from their own organs and must get it from other sources. Their livers and kidneys simply cannot make this material from other materials. For the most part this list of nutrients is not available in complete form in plants.
Our bodies for example make vitamin D from sunlight via our skin (d7). But can also get it in multiple base forms and synthesize it from animal based foods containing d3 or from compounds containing D2. Cats however only have the ability to use D3 and cannot synthesize D7 or convert D2 to D3 (omnivore liver)
In theory you could make food in a lab that is technically vegan and supplies the above nutrients. Nobody has done this.
Regular cat food is food made in the lab combined with such low grade meat that humans can’t eat it.
It turns out that pet diets all around are poorly understood by average people, who regularly shorten their cats lives or cause illnesses.
It turns out that it might be beneficial to work towards better health for our pets, whether thats with vegan food or not.
Vegans are only considering the food for their cats in an effort to make them healthier and happier.
Contrary to the common post here, this topic is not settled science. Anyone acting like it is simply refusing to allow themselves to hear out a perspective they instintually feel repulsed by.
Side note: funny how the most taboo subject on lemmy isnt something like incest or rape, its vegan cats.
That’s literally false, stop spreading easily debunkable misinformation. The meat in cat food is completely safe to eat for humans, it is just not recommended to eat cat food regularly because the nutrients are formulated for, go figure, cats.
It’s true that pet food can be made from animal sources and cuts of meat that humans usually don’t want, because humans (especially those of us in western nations like the US) are spoiled and picky. But that’s actually a good thing; it means we are using the meat we get from slaughtered animals efficiently.
because animal diets are really well understood by people who make the food. in fact we understand pet/livestock diet even better than human diet because it’s easier to test diets on animals. if you simply buy food your vet recommends your pets will have an excellent diet. average people just don’t need to know any more than that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34438805/
so plant based pet foods are actually less reliable than meat based ones, because it’s much harder to account for all the nutrients missing that usually come from meat. It may be theoretically possible to do, but it hasn’t been put into practice and proven yet, which is why no one should be recommending it.
I’m always unsettled when discussing this topic that people can readily accept and understand that pets are unable to digest the same foods as us when it comes to toxic things like grapes or chocolate. Their livers and kidneys can’t break those compounds like caffeine and tartaric acid down as an efficiently as ours.
Similarly people readily accept the idea that a bird can eat nightshade and a deer can eat poison ivy because their bodies can digest foods ours can’t.
But that somehow doesn’t help them infer the same thing can mean those animals cannot get their nutrients from foods the same ways that we can and vice versa. That human dietary concepts don’t just magically apply to the whole animal kingdom
Yeah no. But it takes a big mental effort to push yourself into that belief, so cheers. 🥂
It must be really difficult to admit that there are, surprisingly, asshole vegans, too. Like those who push their human choice of diet onto their pets without thinking about it, glorifying their superiority complex to a degree that hurts another living being, the very thing they say they want to avoid.
Except, well, it is. But hey, don’t let reality stop you from your funny stories.
The most scientific thing I’ve seen out of all of this is a survey of pet owners where vegans say their cats are healthier than other cats. I’m not considering a survey conclusive evidence.
Yeah that’s kinda what I mean. There are people who study this shit. There are decades and decades of experience. There are professionals that can check off both of the previous points.
And yet somehow people go all “it’s not a solved science” and then have degraded their understanding of science to a survey among biased amateurs. Just wow. Social media is damaging society faster than we can keep track of it, it seems.
But it’s not solved science. The one paper I looked at specifically talked about how there aren’t studies doing this. The only direct science we have is a survey asking per owners how healthy they think their pets are.
🤦
I’m continuously baffled to what mental contortions people go just to not admit the answer might after all be obvious.
I mean come on.
Just
Ask
A
Fucking
Professional
Don’t try to be some internet-smarts amateur hipster.
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I work towards better health for my pets by feeding them human grade meat. Happy?
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None of these article titles go anywhere when searched on google.
The articles from the Journal of Animal Science can’t be found on this archive: link
Do you have the DOI for any of these articles?
It seems like it should be easy to find real studies showing vegan diets are bad for cats. I hope this isn’t AI generated.
Separately, I checked this one and it doesn’t exist.
So then this comment is literally misinformation but it’s almost guaranteed to stay up because it’s pro-carnism.
🤭
You got it. I even reported it.
For what it’s worth I’m not even vegetarian. I’m interested in pet health and there really isn’t any studies I can find saying vegan cat food is bad for cats… which I found very surprising. My cat is diabetic so I can only feed her prescription food anyway.
This is so obviously generated by GPT, none of these articles exist.
Is this Chat GPT? So a bunch of made up papers?
Edit: Not that I give a shit about the downvotes, but come on. Give me a link to one of them. Just one. They even left the “Here are some studies…” AI red flag in there.
You were right. I attempted to verify one. It looks good, and it’s close, but it doesn’t exist.
The author exists. The journal exists. In fact, the author did something similar, I think for dogs. But those page numbers don’t line up, and the article title doesn’t exist.
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I apologize, because I was assuming and did delete the comment after checking myself. It was unfair to you for me to have done it that way.
Water under the bridge, no worries. I didn’t realize you had deleted your comment because I replied trough my inbox. I deleted the response.
But the articles literally don’t exist. It’s 2024, do we still have to explain that chatbots can generate nonexistent “scientific” references?
Ok but my meme was funny so clearly I win the conversation /s
It is a funny pic, I’ll give you that.
Why dont we try a more recent one?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/
Summary: In this review, we conducted a formal assessment of the evidence in the form of a systematic review. We found that there has been limited scientific study on the impact of vegan diets on cat and dog health. In addition, the studies that have been conducted tended to employ small sample sizes, with study designs which are considered less reliable in evidence-based practice. Whilst there have been several survey studies with larger sample sizes, these types of studies can be subject to selection bias based on the disposition of the respondents towards alternative diets, or since answers may relate to subjective concepts such as body condition. However, there is little evidence of adverse effects arising in dogs and cats on vegan diets. In addition, some of the evidence on adverse health impacts is contradicted in other studies. Additionally, there is some evidence of benefits, particularly arising from guardians’ perceptions of the diets. Given the lack of large population-based studies, a cautious approach is recommended. If guardians wish to implement a vegan diet, it is recommended that commercial foods are used.
As someone who has worked in science, this passes the sniff test.
That is, science isn’t perfect, at all and is a constant process. Trying to win an argument by “citing the science” is often unscientific, however problematic it is that this can be leveraged by unscientific folks pushing an agenda.