EA - Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative by Karthik Sekar

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative, published by Karthik Sekar on May 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryCarnivore is a classification, not a diet requirement.The amount of meat that cats eat is significant. Transitioning domestic cats to eating vegan would do much good for the environment and animal welfare.Having vegan cats now is not convenient, but we (humanity) should make that so.We do not need to wait around for cultivated meat. There are tractable opportunities now.We also need randomized control trials with measured health outcomes; funding is the main limitation here.Making domestic cats vegan meets all of the Effective Altruism criteria: significant, tractable, and neglected.MainImagine you are a surveyor traveling to remote parts of the world. Within a thick rainforest, you come across an indigenous group long separated from the modern world. They fashion spears to hunt fish and thicket baskets to collect foraged berries. Notably, they wear distinctive yellow loincloths dyed with local fruit. You are not one with words, so you call them the Yellowclothea.This is not a farfetched story. Most species worldwide are classified similarly–someone observes them and then contrives a classification named on what they see. Carnivora was coined in 1821 to describe an Order of animals by the observation that they consumed the meat of other animals–carnem vorāre is Latin for “to eat flesh”.Let us go back to the Yellowclothea. You can already intuit that these natives do not have to wear the yellow loincloths–it is simply what you initially observed. If the natives swapped the dye with purple or green, that would work out fine. However, the rainforest lacks those colors, so Yellowclothea is resigned to their monotone. In other words, wearing yellow cloth is not a requirement for them to live, just what works for them and is available.1821, the year of Carnivora’s naming, is ages ago in the scientific world. It was before the Theory of Evolution, first described in The Origin of Species in 1859. It was before the molecular biology revolution. It was before we understood the basis of metabolism and nutrition. So it is easy to confuse classification/observation with the requirement. It is the same fallacy as assuming that the Yellowclothea people can only wear yellow clothing.Since 1821, we learned more about nutrition, molecular biology, and metabolism to demystify meat. Meat is mostly muscle fibers with some marbled fat and critical nutrients. Carnivora animals generally have more acidic stomachs and shorter gastrointestinal (GI) tracts than nominal herbivores. The extra acid helps chop proteins into the alphabet amino acid molecules, which are readily taken up, so a long GI tract is unnecessary.So Carnivora animals cannot have salads or raw vegetables, which are rich in fiber and would not break down in their GI tracts in time. Nevertheless, we can make protein-rich and highly digestible foods for Carnivora starting from plant and microbial ingredients. Just as a cow will chemically process the plants into their muscle–flesh, we can similarly turn the plants into food that a carnivore would thrive off without an animal intermediary. In other words, we can source all the required nutrients from elsewhere, without meat.There is—at least in theory—no reason why diets comprised entirely of plants, minerals, and synthetically-based ingredients (i.e., vegan diets) cannot meet the necessary palatability, bioavailability, and nutritional requirements of catsAndrew Knight, Director, Centre for Animal Welfare, University of WinchesterI have written about how succeeding meat, dairy, and eggs with plant and microbial-based alternatives will be one of the best things we ever do–I argue that it is better than curing cancer or transitioning ful...