Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we’ve gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links


Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators’ and admins’ comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.


Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki’s actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.


Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100’s of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don’t immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We’ve also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we’ve provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin’s report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we’ve ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we’ve set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of “do no harm”.

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement “do no harm”.

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team


EDIT: Added org operations contact info

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I am not a vegan, but I do try to make food choices that are as ethical and healthy as I can… or at least as far as I can afford.

    Cats are carnivores. Fact. This is not debatable. But I think you could also meet or exceed a cats nutritional needs from other sources. Whether those sources are readily available and whether a person is sufficiently meeting those needs… that’s another can of worms.

    Generally, I’d argue that if you are hell-bent on a vegan diet, then you should not own carnivorous pets. No matter how well meaning you are, there is a significant chance that you will inflict harm on your pet, and that is unacceptable.

      • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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        Pretty reasonable response. This actually made me change my mind up to the possibility of feeding cats a vegan diet from being unacceptable to being an acceptable practice. It’s not one I’m willing to practice on my cats, but I will reserve any judgment when I hear of others practicing it in the wild.

        • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Talk to a vet before even thinking about trying this.

          I am a vet and unless you have the diet formulated by a veterinary nutritionist and then follow it TO THE LETTER, trying to feed a cat a vegan diet is abuse.

          • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            I wouldn’t try this ever, myself. I just am going to stop judging others for trying it, unless I know it is causing their pet harm.

        • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Science is cool, it is only pretty recently becoming possible to do in a reasonable manner thanks to the huge advances in understandings of nutrients and plant based foods.

        • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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          3 months ago

          This actually made me change my mind up to the possibility of feeding cats a vegan diet from being unacceptable to being an acceptable practice.

          And this is why misinformation should never be allowed in public platforms.

          Cats are going to die in agony because the mods folded and gave the lunatics free reign to spread their nonsense and convince gullible people.

          Between this and the far right disinformation bot at this point the only reasonable solution is for other instances to defeferate lemmy.world to quarantine the infection.

          • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            I didn’t say I was going to try it, myself. I’m fine with my cats being carnivores. I just am going to hold back judgment of others who try it.

    • improvisedbuttplug@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You might be surprised at how much corn, grains, and other non-meat stuff there is in cat food. Particularly in cheap dry kibble that nobody typically bats an eye at someone feeding to their cat.

      This conversation just seems so weird to me. The number of people who feed their cats anything similar to what they’d be eating in the wild is minuscule.

      Meat isn’t some magic substance, biological chemical reactions turns grass into cows. That you think you can’t take those nutrients and make them bioavailable to an obligate carnivore is absurd. Ever seen an impossible burger?

      And if you think the cruelty stems from the idea that cats wouldn’t like it, I gotta say. I have my cat on an expensive grain free meat heavy diet. And I know for a fact that he goes crazy for the cheap shitty corn based purina kibble. He has busted into other people’s homes to steal kibble from their cats.

      So is it cruel for me to feed him a more nature based diet when it’s clear he prefers corn based trash?

      I don’t see any reason why a functional vegan cat food couldn’t exist.

    • Kokesh@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You’re forgetting some people are idiots, especially those “better than others” who do crap like this.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I think what people generally want is not reddit. The mods in reddit have almost no accountability from admin.

    Oftentimes comments are removed just because a mod doesn’t agree or like the content.

    I was banned from r/Ukraine simply for saying we shouldn’t demonize the entire population of Russia for the actions of their government. I later argued with the mod through their “arbitration process” and he would not unban me. (What really hurt is that I’m Ukrainian. It was an improvement sub for me)

    No one wants that! Please don’t let that happen here!

    • doctortran@lemm.ee
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      I was banned from /r/grindr for suggesting it’s ok for trans people to use it. It’s legitimately one of the most blatantly, unapologetically terrible mods I’ve ever seen, and it’s just him.

    • nandeEbisu@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’m personally of the opinion that if a community is poorly moderated, you should just make a new community that is better aligned to the level of moderation users actually want and not to rely on a centralized admin team. They should really just be preventing serious abuse, like grooming, and provide support and advice to mods.

      Ultimately its not sustainable and gives Admins too much centralized power to determine to that level what is and isn’t appropriate mod behavior. I get that what you experienced is generally dickish behavior, but that can easily spin out of control when it relies on admin judgement calls like that.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        In reality, even admins don’t hold the ultimate power. This is a federated platform and there are lots of other instances. It’s an extension of the sentiment you express - if people don’t like how things are done on one instance, they can move the community, or even start a new instance.

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    All I’m getting from this entire saga is that vegans on here are lunatics. From forcing this nonsense on pets, to all of the follow-up, this is a very bad look for the community, from somone looking in from the outside.

    This is some cultish behavior…

    • Fallenwout@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Vegans are fine, it are those that enforce/demand it from others that are radicals, all radicals are lunatics.

    • Stern@lemmy.world
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      You get that from anywhere with a chamber that echos well enough. There’s the folks who don’t have kids or want them, and then there’s the anti-natalists who call the people who have children breeders and their kids crotchspawn. There’s the Christians and the Religious Right. Jews and Zionists. List goes on.

    • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I think this is showing that about 70% of the people on here are incapable of reconsidering their positions on something.

      To me thats upsetting, but then again lemmy.world is the low hanging fruit of the fediverse. Other servers would never have picked this fight to begin with.

      • OrangeJoe@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        It’s almost like Lemmy is just another social media site with the same types of people as every other social media site. Regardless of how seemingly a lot of Lemmy users view themselves and Lemmy as a whole.

    • Takapapatapaka@lemmy.world
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      Im no vegan, and was originally convinced that giving cats vegan food was animal abuse, and am still sure its best for cats to eat meat But really, seeing so much people just saying ‘vegans are hysteric/lunatic/cultist’ without any more reflection gave me a weird vibe, like it’s the exact same rethoric used against any progressist idea It got me thinking, like I think I disagree with vegans on the vegan cat food thing but people are being so mean to vegans and tolerant to power abuse, i’d rather be on the vegan side

      • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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        Its likely because most of the arguments against vegan cat food are “of course its bad”, which is a horrible reason to think anything.

        I hope some people also noticed this and allowed them the opportunity to learn more about what is possible for a cats diet.

      • davepleasebehave@lemmy.world
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        my only argument for the vegan food is this: if the cat enjoys the food and it provides all the nutrients then what is the issue?

        No one is suggesting we force feed cats wall paper paste.

      • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        No. Caring about animal welfare and refusing to support the industrial farming complex is noble and admirable.

        Trying to force your diet and ideas onto animals that cannot object is fucked up.

        If you can’t feed your pet a proper diet do not get a pet.

        • toomanypancakes@lemmy.world
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          If you haven’t done the smallest iota of research into what vegan pet foods entail, declaring them an improper diet as a knee jerk reaction is, quite frankly, not a good look for you.

          • fross@lemmy.world
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            So far the only “research” shared on this thread has been a marketing blurb from a manufacturer who makes this stuff.

            Not sure the people arguing for this are able to actually conduct research, let alone post about it in an intelligent way.

            • toomanypancakes@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Considering all the links posted in the last circlejerk thread were dismissed out of hand as “pro vegan” I’m not surprised nobody is wasting their time here.

              Not sure the people arguing against this are aware how much corn, rice, soy, and supplemental taurine is in the meat based foods they give their cats already anyway, so it hardly seems worthwhile to go back to square one every fifth post.

            • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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              Feel free to do some research. I’m sure you’d trust your own eyes better than some random posting here.

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The comments in here are unbelievable. This post was about the systemic moderation issues that lead to the incident, the team’s response to it, and how to deal with such a problems in the future.

    Half the comments: CATS CAN’T EAT VEGAN

    The other half: CATS CAN TOO EAT VEGAN


    There are people here who need to go back to fucking reddit.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      in defense of those people the previous thread showed up on basically every lemmy instance under the sun, there are memes about it now.

      I’m not sure what else you were expecting with a site wide drama such as this tbh.

    • davidagain@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      go back to fucking reddit

      Yeah, fuck reddit, and fuck u/spez.

      Er, am I doing this right?

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      It’s not just a diet thing, it’s a matter of animal abuse.

      I don’t doubt that there are options out there for people that want to feed their pets a vegan-friendly diet, but given that cats primarily eat meat the idea of promoting a vegan diet that isn’t heavily monitored and noted by their vet is an awful look for the vegan community and Lemmy. You absolutely cannot expect people to just treat this as a moderation issue, because at its most fundamental level it’s about whether lemmy.world supports content that is harmful to animals.

      I said it elsewhere here, and since people don’t like it being raised I’ll say it again: shit like this wouldn’t fly on Reddit. Lemmy has a poor reputation on the Fediverse for housing extreme opinions, and this debacle really won’t help its reputation as a fed-friendly alternative to Reddit. Saying “go back to Reddit” just highlights the problem more, and is probably why there are plenty of posts on the Fediverse asking why Lemmy is so hostile, or why it’s nowhere near as friendly as many communities on Mastodon.

      • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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        Here’s an idea, why don’t you save your argument for one of the myriad posts that have popped up discussing this very subject of whether or not cats can eat vegan or not and whether or not that is abuse.

        But here and now within this post is a discussion over whether or not mods acted recklessly and whether or not there is a need for better guidelines on what is and isn’t allowed. Which were discussed in the post that you apparently didn’t read.

        At no point did the author of this post open up the floor to discuss whether or not veganism is good, bad, or ugly for cats.

        • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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          Because the question at the time wasn’t does lemmy.world support potential animal abuse. Whether it is or isn’t isn’t really the topic here, but if one side feels strongly against the potential for abuse, there’s a question regarding lax moderation and what an instance supports.

          Again, it’s not a great look for a community that isn’t looked upon favourably across the fediverse. Again, I’m sure it is possible that someone has created a vegan-friendly brand of cat food, but you have to assume that the topic of potential abuse will come up. Is an online forum the appropriate place to be giving what could be harmful advice that could endanger an animal if the wrong brand is pushed?

        • Lightor@lemmy.world
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          Telling people what to say and where, very reddit of you.

          You could have just ignored the post and move on guy.

            • Lightor@lemmy.world
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              Maybe.

              Here’s an idea, why don’t you save your argument for one of the myriad posts that have popped up discussing this very subject of whether or not this is the right forum to discuss this.

              At no point did I open up the floor to discuss whether or not your stance is good, bad, or ugly. I only talked about your delivery.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      The question is at the root of which moderator’s actions are correct. There’s a reactionary bias from tons of Reddit-fugees that came out of vegan bashing and anti-vegan hysteria which we see crop up repeatedly.

      It can be difficult to distinguish between people sincere, abet misguided, beliefs and outright trolls. And moderation takes a significant temporal and emotional toll. “Vegans are killing their pets/kids!!!” is a popular panic phrase intended to gin up hostility. Consequentaly, the mods in these communities are playing endless wack-a-mole with trolls who just want to conflate veganism with an esoteric form of cruelty.

      Establishing a bright line of appropriate content is important for good moderation. But to know where that line is, you need some degree of objection information.

      Which brings us back to the fundamental question of whether safe, reliable vegan cat food exists (spoilers: it’s been around for decades). But if you don’t accept that premise, you’re going to see any mod censorship as some diabolical cat killing agenda.

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Cats are obligate carnivores. It’s trivial to stroll into any store and get food that will make your cat healthy but its not clear how easy it is to get vegan food that will do the same. Seems like if you don’t believe in eating meat you should just not have a little carnivore in your home. For instance rabbits can be trained to live inside, cuddle with you, and poop in a box.

  • ripcord@lemmy.world
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    Wow. I have no involvement in the original issue and I’m definitely not as familiar with the circumstances and details as others. There may be a lot missing here.

    But this feels like a very mature, logical, empathetic, well-intentioned response and the kind of thing I like to see.

    • jelloeater - Ops Mgr@lemmy.worldM
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      We’re just trying to do the best we can to consider everyone involved and what we can do better going forward. We’re all just volunteers trying to keep things positive and stable. 🙏 ❤️

      Thanks!

  • rustyfish@lemmy.world
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    Not that I think Rooki was wrong with what they did. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how fast such stuff can get out of control.

    Thing happened. Admins reflected on thing. Came up with solution. Communicated solution with community in an understandable and transparent manner. Perfect.

    If that lazy fucks over at Reddit would have been half as good as you with theirs jobs, we probably wouldn’t be here to begin with.

    • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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      This is all PR, lemmy.world didnt make good with their vegan community, they just want everyone else to think they are fair and level headed. Reddit has the exact same PR, except they were trying to make money openly, while most assume lemmy.world admins are losing or breaking even (whether thats true or not).

      Put simply, reddit was trying to collect more profit from their users one way, and lemmy.world is trying to collect its donations in another, but PR servers both cases.

      Doesnt really matter theres plenty of space elsewhere for the vegan community, which is the beauty of the fediverse.

  • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.world
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    Feeding a carnivore a vegan diet indeed is animal abuse. Cats can survive, but survival and healthy are not the same. Cats on a vegan diet get sick much faster and die younger, statistically according to vets. I’m a vegan, I have cats, I feed them meat. If you don’t like feeding your pets meat, get a herbivore pet instead.

    The way things were handled may have been wrong, but animal abuse should be banned from Lemmy imo.

  • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Animal abuse isn’t an opinion. It’s evil. And malice by ignorance that could be corrected is malice.

    Stop apologizing for doing your jobs. We all have opinions and raise them loudly in the Fediverse so I understand your natural reaction and want to communicate well. But IMHO this is troll feeding. If they posted in favor of human genocide, you’d close a ticket, and move on, not write an apology for taking it down.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/

      Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat. Although obligate carnivores in the wild, domestic cats still need nutrients they would normally source from prey. Thankfully Benevo Cat contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable kibble.

      Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.

      We’ve had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.

      • MJKee9@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Just because the company making money off of purchasers says it’s good for cats. Doesn’t mean it’s good for cats. Other than one study that relied on surveyed answers from vegan pet owners, I haven’t seen any evidence that a vegan diet is safe for cats.

        • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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          They didnt say that, they said its been independently verified to be healthy, exactly thr same way meat based cat food is verified.

          If you would give your cat regular canned food then vegan cat food from benevo meets the same requirements.

          Also meat based cat food is not the quality you likely think it is.

          • Doorbook@lemmy.world
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            Yes the same goes for human, you can create manufacture food checking all the marks that you believe is needed. But ignoring the fact that human evolve over thousands of years to eat food that biologically manufacture. The nuance of diet is still studied to this day and suggestion something out of norm for an animal that cannot comprehend what is happening should be consider abuse. You dont own a pet, you take care of one…

            Update: this also not limited to forcing cat to eat vegan food. Animal abuse include inhumane slaughter houses, and feeding your pet unhealthy diet, fat cats for example is also abuse.

            • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Do cats normally eat what’s in regular canned cat food?

              Show me the herd or cats that hunt cows and pigs. Or how about the ones that swim in the ocean and eat salmon or trout.

              How about all of the synthetic additions to the food? Is that what they would normally eat? Vegan taurine is in meat based cat food too.

              Sound like we already force our cats to eat whatever we deem appropriate, regardless of what the cat would choose to eat if left alone.

              Unless you are arguing noone should have a pet then I dont see the consistency in your argument.

      • Soup@lemmy.cafe
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        3 months ago

        It’s still forcing YOUR diet on a helpless animal. They eat meat.

        End of story.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.

    For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.

    This is pretty much Change Management.

    • feddylemmy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Solid idea. One consequence of this would be the possible delay in removing material that really should be removed as fast as possible, though.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Which is why the content would get masked until a 2nd person approves or it gets unmasked.

          • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Change Management can account for that, but if it’s truely that big of a problem then there might be legal or other compelling reasons to keep the content server side and inaccessible.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I was just thinking about this: peer review admin actions. A first admin could initiate the action, then the peer review could be assigned randomly to another admin - randomly so that admins can’t create specific cartels to team up on specific topics.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Personally, I like this idea. But it can be equally abused if two admins colluded to agree with each other. But, I think it’s at least better than nothing.

      I would imagine this would need to be done at the software level to be most effective. You should request this sort of feature from the Lemmy team to integrate into both the backend and the UI.

      If you do create issues for this request, you should post back here (or whatever related community) so people can upvote the issues to show the devs we really want the feature.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I think a 3 person team is better. 1 mod/admit marks something for moderation. 2 other mods need to agree to mod. If 1 of the mods disagrees, it stays.

      This is inspired by true events in September 1983, where a russian command post in charge of their nuclear weapons caught on radar 4 incoming missles, supposedly fired from America. The captain in charge turned his key to fire every nuke they had at America. The second in command turned his key as well. The third in command refused. His logic was if America was going to fire nukes, why fire exactly 4 nukes and only 4 nukes, all targeting the same location? Would it not make sense to deplay thousands if you’re trying for a surprise ambush?

      Those nukes that America fired? Clouds. The Earth was at just the right rotation for 30 minutes to confuse the russian radar into interpreting 4 missle shaped clouds as solid objects.

      America was almost turned to dust for no reason, 2 weeks before I was born. Because of some happy fluffy white clouds, that even Bob Ross will admit almost DID cause an accident!

      So yeah. Maybe we do a 3 mod system.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        We’re not dealing with nukes.

        But any standard change management process can do that. I don’t think 3 people need to be involved in most matters.

  • nl4real@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I appreciate you guys owning up to this, especially since a lot of people here seemed determined to ignore the actual issue and just start a redditesque circle jerk about vegans.

    • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You missed the point of the post.

      This goes beyond the c/vegan issue; it is addressing systematic lemmy issues between admins, moderators, and users.

      • Skeezix@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        As one of the biggest shitposters on Lemmy, maybe you wanna sit this one out?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/

      Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat. Although obligate carnivores in the wild, domestic cats still need nutrients they would normally source from prey. Thankfully Benevo Cat contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable kibble.

      Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.

      We’ve had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.

  • rowinxavier@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I’m reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said “Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it”.

    If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don’t axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.

    As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don’t have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.

    • Wilzax@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Never fire someone for an accident unless the accident was a symptom of willful negligence. Fire them for being unqualified or incompetent, sure, but not for an honest mistake. Training someone to avoid that mistake in the future will be far less expensive than replacing them, and they’re going to be far less likely to make mistakes like it ever again.

    • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      The idea that it’s dangerous to raise children on a vegan diet is unequivocally false, and misinformation. Every major health authority has made statements affirming that a properly implemented plant-based diet is entirely nutritionally adequate for all stages of life. Literally the only supplement that’s strictly necessary in the majority of cases is b12 - which is something that everyone should be supplementing with anyway. Aside from that it’s easier to get adequate nutrition from plant-based diets than it is on the Standard American Diet.

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/

      https://bitesizevegan.org/the-crime-of-raising-vegan-kids-when-diet-is-deadly/

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome is good the moderators of c/vegan do not tolerate discussion. Any opinion that goes against the orthodoxy of the echo bunker leads to a permanent ban. If you express any opinion other that, “It’s fully acceptable to force your extremist philosophy on an obligate carnivore by feeding it an unnatural vegan diet” you will be banned. It’s an incredibly closed minded and intolerant community.

    • Fern@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Forgive me for being suspicious of your comment. There is a huge anti-vegan bias in society, and many argue against veganism, not in good faith. Can you provide any examples of the mods doing this?

      • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Sure…this discussion came up a couple of months ago. Several people argued that feeding a herbivorous diet to a carnivore was animal abuse. Everyone arguing that point, including myself, was banned and all comments not supporting the group think in the echo bunker were removed.

        Need more?

        • Fern@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          More would be great. What sort of arguments did you make? We’re you discussing the science?

          • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Basically the same as we’re listed here. Obligate carnivores require a largely meat based diet. Some guys book where he claims is ok isn’t good enough proof. You need peer reviewed and published science with a large population over a long time to be sure.

            Just very obvious stuff. Carnivores require meat.

    • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      This is not exclusive to c/vegan; other communities have similar issues you have brought up; they have also been called out by a few, but c/vegan is getting the most traction.

      It goes back to user, mod, and admin control over their communities.

      This post seems to address the overpolicing conflict.