Veggieness

Having left behind the ways of our cavemen ancestors and risen above our backward-thinking, corpse-chewing peers it’s easy to forget the food chain still exists. While our meat-eating friends and family spend their days hunting rabbits and boar to make stew and loincloths we spend our time absorbed in the arts, full on renaissancing. But beyond enlightened humans the food chain does still exist. Dung beetles are still eaten by chaffinches which in turn are eaten by horses which in turn are eaten by bears which in turn are eaten by sharks which in turn are eaten by Roy Scheider. All of which leaves us with the kind of no-right-answer moral dilemma us Zeroes live for: What to feed our pets.

Some pets are natural vegetarians (rabbits, rhinoceroses, presidents of student unions) so give us no trouble at all. But many are omnivores (mice, hamsters, goldfish) and carnivores (cats, snakes, polar bears). So what are we going to do? Should we feed them big dirty-bad death meat? Should we kill them slowly with carrots?

Schmorality
Let’s go back to our Why Thoughs, our reasons for going veggie ourselves. Let’s start with the morality of the thing. If we’re saying veggieness if a moral choice, it could be argued it’s morally unjust to force our morality onto animals who are unlikely to share it. But then it could also be argued that it’s not that animals disagree with our moral position but that morality doesn’t exist for them, that they don’t have a belief system to be compromised. If that’s the case then feeding them a vegan diet is no different to feeding them cheap shit or organic swank, or dressing them up as RBG for Halloween. It’s your basic “While you’re under my roof” tyranny that has crushed the souls of pets and teenagers for millennia. I’d say the veggies have it on morality, but only by a whisker.

Schmature
Let’s look at the tiresome Yeah Buts, the arguments our meat-eating pals throw at us like we’ve never heard them before. Let’s look at what’s considered natural. It could be argued if we’re feeding omnivorous or carnivorous animals a veggie or vegan diet we’re going against their natural way of life. But look inside that can you bought Tiddles: It’s full of gravy and chicken and duck and beef and tuna. There’s no one going to tell me a cat naturally eats gravy and chicken and duck and beef and tuna. Tiddles doesn’t sneak out of the cat flap to hunt down cows at night. She’s not whipping up jugs of Bisto to go with them. She’s not scuba diving for tuna. There’s nothing natural about the food you’re giving Tiddles. If you want to stick to what’s natural you should be feeding her live mice and injured birds. Still, meat is broadly what carnivores eat, even if it’s from animals they wouldn’t recognise if they passed them on the street. I’d say the meat-feeders have it on nature, but only by a Whiskas.

Photo by Timothy Meinberg on Unsplash

Schmutrition
Let’s look at nutrition. Paint-flinging semi-nudists Peta say cats and dogs can thrive on a vegetarian diet. The Vegan Society says they can go full-blown vegan. The pitchfork-wielding rest of the world says it can’t be done, but then they say that about us, mistaking their ignorance for knowledge. Middle roaders The Vegetarian Society says while dogs can cope on a vegetarian diet, cats are a little fussier, needing arachidonic acid, taurine and vitamins A and B12 which are only found in sufficient quantities in meat. Taurine deficiency, the Vegetarian Society says, can lead to irreversible blindness, which is the worst of all the blindnesses, But supplements are available and crammed into decent vegetarian and vegan pet food, and if you hit the Interweb’s forums you’ll find cat owner upon cat owner saying their vegan cats are not just fine but also dandy. And if we’ve learned anything about the Internet it’s that we can trust faceless strangers to deliver bias-free facts entirely free of agenda. So it seems it’s possible. Possibly. Depending on who you believe. I’d say it’s a draw on nutrition.

Schlaughterhouses
We’re not getting anywhere here. Let’s go back to the most basic of basics: As veggies, do we want to buy cans of dead animals? The pet food industry treats its animals about as well as the human food industry, which is to say they frighten and torture and kill them. If we buy cans of dead animals we’re giving our permission for that to continue, as we would be if we bought steak for ourselves. That doesn’t help decide if we could or should feed our pets veggie diets, but it wins a point for your basic veggie outrage.

So where does this leave us? Between morality, nature, nutrition and the slaughterhouse we’re about where we started, in the kind of irresolvable moral limbo we love. If we feed our pets meat, we’re wrong. If we don’t feed our pets meat, we’re still wrong. In conclusion, do what you like; I’m getting a rabbit.

Photo credit (header image): Supafine at MorgueFile

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