From: young@serum.kodak.com (Rich Young)
Subject: Re: Dick Gregory and Vegetarian Pets
Originator: young@sasquatch
Reply-To: young@serum.kodak.com
Organization: Clinical Diagnostics Division, Eastman Kodak Company
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 92 23:03:19 GMT

In article <altar.724704726@sfu.ca> altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar) writes:
>
>Dick Gregory, the well-known comedian turn pacifist wrote:
>
>     People are funny about their pets and their pets' diet.
>     When you suggest to some folks that they ought to try
>     putting their dogs and cats on a meatless diet, they will
>     respond as though their little pets had never been
>     domesticated!  They will say, "Dogs and cats are supposed to
>     eat meat.  After all, they're descended from tigers and
>     wolves!"  Of course, if there was any real practicing line
>     of descent, the chances are the pets would already have
>     consumed their owners and their owners' kids!

Why?  They're not "tigers and wolves," they're DESCENDED FROM "tigers and
wolves."  In the first stages of domestication, they may well have "consumed
their owners and their owners' kids" on occasion...wolves at least, the
ancestor of the domestic cat was probably too small to be a threat.  Even at
that, however, today's domestic cat or dog, left to its own devices will
rarely choose granola over hamburger, given the choice.  [Note: that's not
to imply that hamburger alone is a healthy diet for cat or dog.]

>     . . . Some pet owners, who would object to the killing of
>     animals for the human diet, justify their purchasing meat
>     from the butchers fro their pets' consumption because the
>     pets are natural carnivores.  So they feed their pets beef,
>     horse meat, pork, lamb, liver and all other forms of butcher
>     shop raw meat.  But that is not the "natural" raw meat diet
>     of the carnivorous pet!  To be consistent, such a pet owner
>     would feed a dog raw rabbit, or chicken, or any of the small
>     animals or birds the pet would naturally seize as prey.

What difference does it make what the source of the meat might be?  Rabbit
thigh is not significantly different, nutritionally, from bovine thigh as far
as the average cat or dog is concerned.  This is an irrelevant argument.

What MIGHT be relevant would be the observation that meat, alone, is an
insufficient diet for either cat or dog.  In the wild, carnivores eat entrails
and the partially digested contents of those entrails, and thus obtain many
plant-based nutrients which are not present in muscle tissue.  While the
domestic cat and dog have been bred for neoteny and some degree of
subservience to man (which many cats seem to defy regularly), their basic
dietary needs do not seem to have changed much from their ancestors.
Related wild species certainly do not irrefutably prove, but do lend support
to this.

>     Sometimes a pet owner will rationalize, "I tried giving my
>     pet fruits and vegetables and more natural foods, but it
>     preferred the canned pet food."  It never seems to occur tot
>     he pet owner that the dog would prefer to relieve itself on
>     the carpet, and would probably prefer NOT to roll over and
>     play dead!  Pet owners think nothing of housebreaking a dog,
>     or training it to do tricks or to attack unwanted visitors;
>     in short, to do things for the owner's benefit.  But the
>     same owner resists changing a pet's diet for the pet's
>     benefit, and training the pet to eat it!

What benefit does a cat or dog receive from being fed as a vegetarian?  Any
benefit which flows from this practice washes only the misguided owner of
said creature.  This is not to say that a healthy vegetarian diet for a cat
is an impossible goal, but rather that there is no discernable benefit to the
cat.  Is it healthier, happier, longer-lived, more fertile?  Again, the only
benefits of such a practice accrue solely to the owner, not the pet.  Sure,
you can train your pet to eat YOUR choice of food, but please don't call such
a practice beneficial to the pet...in the case of the vegetarian cat, it is
nothing more than salve to the conscience of the owner.


-Rich Young (These are not Kodak's opinions.)
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg