The Vegetarian Dilemma: Feeding Our Companions Other Animals
If you are vegetarian or vegan and live with a companion animal, then you may have experienced this dilemma: you want your companion dog or cat to have the best diet and the healthiest food available to them, but you also have a problem reconciling buying them meat. As someone who cares deeply about animals and chooses not eat them for ethical reasons, you may not want to buy meat and support the farmed animal industry in any way. However, should our companion animals be subjected to our ethical choices? Could there be serious health implications for your cat or dog if you base their diet on your ethics. How do you reconcile these conflicting feelings and ideas?
A recent study looks at how vegetarians and vegans “make pet ownership, fueled by (their) positive attitudes and emotions toward animals, consistent with their own vegetarianism.” The most obvious solution would be to feed the companion animal a vegetarian diet, but “according to a number of veterinary and nutrition experts,” the study notes, “vegetarian diets are unsafe for cats but less dangerous for dogs.” This should not surprise us: dogs, cats, and humans are different species, after all, each with their own evolutionary paths. Many veg*ns have experimented with feeding their companions vegetarian diets and some food companies are trying to offer nutritionally complete alternatives to regular cat and dog food. But the success rate of these diets has not been scientifically established, especially when looking at cats and dogs separately. This survey of nearly 300 veg*ns (with a split of about 59% vegans and 41% vegetarians) examined what they feed their companions, their level of guilt around this choice, and their perceived appropriateness of an animal-based diet for pets.
The study found that there were marked differences between how veg*ns perceived the diets of their dogs vs. their cats and also that there were differences between vegetarians and vegans. For dogs, “vegans were less likely to feed their dog a diet high in meat/fish than were vegetarians. For example, 37.8% of vegans compared with 12.1% of vegetarians reported feeding their pet a diet less than 25% from meat/fish.” For cats, however, “vegans did not differ from vegetarians in the meat/fish composition of their cat diet.” For both dogs and cats, vegans experienced “greater food guilt” than vegetarians. However, the study notes that the differences between how much meat vegetarians and vegans fed their dog seemed to result “in part from how much meat/fish they perceived it appropriate for a dog to eat.” So, because vegans are more likely to perceive dogs as not needing a diet high in animal protein, this leads to greater guilt when they provide such food to their dog. This may mean that, on some level, vegans are “aware of prevailing medical views that vegetarian diets are possible for dogs.”
Why is this important for animal advocacy and what is the significance of these findings? Overall, the study showed that veg*ns “clearly approach pet diet differently for dogs than they do for cats.” Also, the “reactions and behaviors” of veg*ns are “generally consistent with prevailing medical opinion indirectly suggests that participants were reasonably well-informed on the issue of pet diet.” For those of us who advocate for both farmed animals and companion animals, we recognize that these choices are not easy. The intersection of farmed and companion animal welfare is a complicated one that arose before ethical veganism or vegetarianism gained traction. Moving forward, it will require a balancing act to make the best choices for our companions while also recognizing the additional suffering those choices causes for farmed animals.