Ok, Xunil, where does all this muck in tins that are fed to dogs and cats come from?
Surley thats where our excess horses go? (And there are few animals more useless than a nag)
OK, I don't want to sail out over deep waters here, but most of the vegetarian friends I have seem to share a variation on the theme of objecting to farming animals for food - as in, raising and killing the animal for food.
I can't see how that applies to dog food since animal 'waste' products appears to be the major ingredient to most canned and some dry dog foods. The animals were not farmed/raised and killed solely to make the dog food, therefore my simplistic logic tells me that the fundamental objection cannot apply since the farmed animal is:
1. already dead
2. was killed for another primary purpose
3. was not solely raised to ultimately become dog food
What I am getting at is why inflict a very personal lifestyle and ultimately dietary choice on an animal (that most owners would purport to love) that is genetically preprogrammed to hunt and eat meat ?
If said owner is going to make that choice for their animal, doesn't the animal at least deserve for it to be done properly ?
You wouldn't take a pound of sausages to the lake to feed the local ducks.
Why expect Rover to flourish on carrot and potato peelings ?
This is great campfire chatter and there are far too many facets to explore properly where the forum environment doesn't allow facial and vocal expression and where the written word can sometimes be taken any one of a number of ways that it wasn't intended to mean.
My basic stance: a dog is primarily, if not necessarily solely, a meat eater. Just because a dog
can do well on a well thought out and implemented vegetarian diet doesn't mean that it should. My baseline objection is founded on the above mentioned cases where folks were effectively shoving kitchen peelings and vegetable waste into their pooch and then, lo and behold, illness and death follow. The dietary needs had to have been abused for some time to reach the stage of death, and for quite a while to cause the level of illness my vet mentioned to me. That's what I can't cope with.
People can choose their own path.
That could be anything from knitting your own yoghurt, hunting with a bow and arrows, going vegan, opting to only eat fish or white meat, etc, etc and so on. We have the luxury of choice.
Dogs, being almost entirely dependent on their owners, haven't that luxury, and by and large it is fair to say that animals aren't generally farmed for the sole purpose of making them into tins of pooch food.
I just find it distasteful, extreme and downright cruel unless it is approached properly, which the cases I mentioned weren't.
We definitely need a campfire and a good brew to hammer this out properly
