I have tried reasoning with them about meat eating and the suffering they are causing but they just look at me like I am dumb. They do this on most subjects. Sometimes I think they have a point.

We feed them dried meat cat food. The order of preference when purchasing is lamb, beef, chicken, fish. Basically trying to buy stuff that is more likely to a bye-product of a process in which the animal didn’t suffer too much. (I know there are no such things as bye-products in this sense and that almost all commercial production causes suffering but this is a compromise). We try to avoid fish for the reasons outlined in the other blog posting on vegetarian cats. Personally I don’t believe any fishery is sustainable. Even unrepentant carnivores should avoid fish they haven’t caught themselves if they have an environmental conscience.

One day we will try them on veggie or vegan food. I suspect we would have to starve them first! They certainly look like they would eat me before they ate vegan.

Before I owned cats I didn’t appreciate what a carnivore really was. These things kill for a living and if we didn’t molly coddle them they would be pros. Until we moved to a flat I didn’t realize how nocturnal they were!

Generally I think animals are very good for the children. I wouldn’t like to raise children in an environment that isn’t shared non-humans.

I don’t have a cat myself, and I almost certainly wouldn’t get one for the very reason that they do want to eat meat. As you say it’s what they do naturally, so knowing that I wouldn’t want to create more of a demand for meat. I also don’t want to encourage people to keep cats as pets for that and other reasons, like the effect they have on local bird populations, etc, and I think keeping a cat encourages other people to do likewise.

But if I’d only recently decided to be vegetarian and already had a cat, I might want my cat to be vegetarian for the same reason. Bearing in mind that I’ve made a decision in the past to get a cat — a decision that I can’t undo and that I have to live with, but one that has ethical consequences I’m not happy with — if I’ve decided to reduce the amount of harm caused by my household diet and if my cat was willing to eat vegetarian food and if it was healthy for the cat to do that, then why not? Weighing up the balance of a cat’s desire for meat against the harm caused to other animals (farm animals, wild fish) to me the equation comes out against giving the cat what it wants just because it wants it. Assuming, as I said, that it’s healthy and the cat is prepared to put up with it. I don’t want to starve a cat to death.

There can also be esthetic considerations, in that the smell of meat can be extremely unpleasant when you’ve been vegetarian for a long time, and the smell of pet food even worse.

If the idea is to do things naturally, then a cat should eat meat. If you want to treat the cat with respect, then it should get the requirements that it needs. I’m not sure I understand the justification for not feeding a cat meat. It’s what they eat. It’s what they need. What is the purpose of not feeding them meat?

I love my cat.