The U.S. Culture(s) thread

I'm not sure the best place to put this one, so I'm going to start with this thread...

Health mutt: proposal to put shelter dogs on vegan diet divides Los Angeles

edited 29th Dec '17 6:38:15 AM by Wyldchyld

I don‘t think that plants are the natural food for canines (there‘s a reason the clade is called „carnivora“) so I‘d proceed carefully.

Meanwhile...

In reality.

And the hypocrisy awards goes to...

...People is seriously saying that Dogs shouldnt eat meat....

...I will give Summer all the meat that I can. He will enjoy his meat.

Dogs aren't as obligate as cats, but they're still pretty darn carnivorous. Anybody who thinks otherwise gets to pick the squits, up-chucks or bullets up. And, good luck with the gas.

Dogs can eat a varied diet, but only as long as the meat content is retained, and there are links (still being explored, so implications aren't fully understood) between non-meat content and impact on social behaviour as well as health.

I've worked in a variety of zoological roles, and I've worked in veterinary surgeries, so I've seen first-hand what the variety of impacts can be on dog health from vegan diets.

It is possible to maintain the health of a dog on a long-term vegan diet, but only through carefully tailored nutritional plans that include veterinary support (specifically, veterinary nutritionists — not all vets have decent knowledge about nutrition). In other words, doing it without risking long-term harm to the dog is expensive, in part because it's tailored to the individual animal; there is no one-size-fits-all solution to putting a dog on a long-term vegan diet.

For private individuals who have made a choice to go down the route of a carefully tailored plan with veterinary support, the added expense is their own private affair. The problem for dog shelters (or any animal shelter) is that having the money to keep the shelter going is always a struggle, and that's before we consider the burden of having carefully tailored vegan diets for each individual dog in the shelter: because that is what's necessary for a vegan diet that is healthy over the long-term (and that means genuinely healthy; I've seen pets that the owners thought were completely healthy on their vegan diet - and to all outward appearance they actually do seem healthy - only for internal scans, including bone scans, to reveal a far different story).

The vegan lobbyists therefore need to put their money where their mouth is because a properly tailored diet that accommodates each individual dog in the shelter will be an expense many shelters cannot currently afford.

My guess is that the long-term solution to accommodating the expense of a universal vegan diet programme in dog shelters will be to increase euthanasia rates in shelters and/or to decrease the amount of animals a shelter can house at any one time.

I also think if the main motivation of the vegan lobbyists is about tackling factory farming, forcing shelters to feed vegan diets to their dogs isn't going to be the help they think it is. And, from an environmental perspective, not only would the switch not solve the environmental impact of industrial livestock farming, it would actually exacerbate the already significant environment impact of industrial crop farming.

There's a myth that being vegan is automatically good for the environment. It might choke off some aspects of the environmental impact of industrial livestock farming, but it only exacerbates the environmental impact of industrial crop farming. The second-biggest greenhouse gas source from industrial farming after cows? Rice.

edited 29th Dec '17 8:32:44 AM by Wyldchyld

Yeah, this is a stupid move. But PETA is insane the vast majority of the time. (If you ever have to take an animal to a shelter never take it to a PETA shelter. They've got something like a 5% adoption rate. Because apparently being a pet is the worst fate an animal could ever suffer regardless of how good the owners are.)

This-and pretty much all PETA run shelters are kill-shelters. If you bring in a stray, try to find a no-kill shelter; there are enough of them around. Almost every animal that ends up in PETA's hands winds up dead very shortly.

@Angelus Nox

I uses to think vegan parodies were just exaggerations of what vegans actually are, until I interacted with some extreme vegans that follow that Vegan Artbook webcomic.

http://www.veganartbook.com

Honestly, trying to make L.A. into a very progressive city by making the animal shelters have a vegan diet for dogs, is only helping progressives look stupid.

Taking a quick browse through that webcomic I could feel becoming dumber and having the urge to eat blue rare steak out of spite.

Also, lets see them try the same thing for cats and just wait how many dead rodents will show up in their kitties mouths.

edited 29th Dec '17 5:08:16 PM by AngelusNox

Functionally, it's a kind of religious cult.

Well, it's not like PETA has to feed its animals for very long anyways.

Extreme vegan groups like PETA really seem to live on Insane Troll Logic.

If you want to put pets on a more ethical diet, then bulk raise bugs. Insect sourced protein based pet foods are already available, and higher volume of orders would almost certainly help the price to fall - it is inherently a more efficient way to produce protein, but currently costs are higher than ideal because the scale of production is too low.

That’s actually a good idea, but PETA got offended that one time Obama smacked a fly. They probably wouldn’t be okay with that idea.

Like I said, insane. They’ve been teetering on the edge of saying that humans should be removed as a factor. But they won’t say that, because PETA is full of hypocrites. Since a lot of their higher-up people actually have pets, for example, and not very many of them are actually vegan.

Ethical veganism is the technical term for the philosophy the aforementioned comic covers.

Setting aside the moral quandaries for a more appropriate thread, the biggest problem with ethical veganism becomes apparent as a backhanded form of cultural superiority. "We've moved past needing to eat meat, so therefore we're morally superior to those who still eat meat...even if those meat-eaters are from a country where there's no alternative." Most of the time, the simple fact that those countries have no other options are just ignored in favor of promoting the narrative that eating meat is morally wrong.

It's a movement very much grounded in a first-world biased perspective, so it's not a huge surprise that the movement has subtly but definitely attracted racists, most of which are (very ironically) associated with a sub-movement known as the "abolitionists", headed by one Gary Francione. As you can imagine, this makes it an even harder sell.

There are indeed practical environmental and health concerns associated with meat consumption, but most of those could be readily addressed via programs to move away from beef consumption in favor of white meats like chicken or fish. However, many countries are heavily culturally and economically invested in cattle ranching - including the U.S. of course. So it wouldn't be an easy transition, but it's made harder by ethical veganism's own problems muddying the waters around the issue.

Evironmental and health concerns surrounding livestock farming extend to chicken and fish farming as well. It also extends to crop farming. Going vegetarian or vegan does a person no good in their quest to 'fix' the environment if they're supporting industrial crop farming (and most vegetarians/vegans actually are).

That's the issue here: it's the modern, intensive farming practices found in both livestock and crop farming. That's the real mountain that needs to be climbed.

edited 30th Dec '17 10:41:10 AM by Wyldchyld

I can't really respond to that here, since we're off topic and would only get further so if we continued. Mind if we take this line of discussion to the environmentalism thread?

I know we do, hence why I asked if we should discuss it there.

edited 30th Dec '17 11:10:44 AM by TotemicHero

I think we do have an environmental thread.

I swear, US Culture can turn even the noblest of causes into a status competition. Ask a mormon how life is when the entire neighborhood is competing to be the nicest and most humble and most pious as a matter of pride.

Using your diet as a way of judging other people is just ridiculous.

Post industrial farming is an interest of mine, so I will join you guys there if you post this topic.

There's a post-industrial farming topic?

We are discussing the possibility of posting about Industrial Farming on the Environmentalism thread.

We could discuss US farm culture.

I brought this up a while back, pointing out an article indicating there is a rising suicide rate among farmers, and why this might be happening.