> It doesn't change a lot anyway.
It's a change for you, that's for sure, but not for the World.

Granted, one person out of the 6 or 7 billions we are makes no difference at all. But that’s not the reality. It’s becoming more and more popular to do this so it snowballs. Until you reach a tipping point where there is enough people doing it that companies start seeing an opportunity to make money and offer new products/lowers the price/increases availability/reduces friction. And that all started from individuals doing anything as opposed to nothing. It didn’t tip the balance individually but as more and more people started doing it, it is now shifting. I can go to the supermarket and find meat alternatives. It wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago. It’s still a drop in the bucket but it’s more than no drop in the bucket.

> minks in a cage vs cats confined

You see the difference though? An indoors cat with access to windows, toys, and plenty of space to move about (if it’s a livable amount of space for a human, surely it is for a cat that is 1/30th the volume of a human) vs minks raised with no other concerns than the quality of their furs at the expense of everything else and stacked up in overcrowded cages is a different situation. I’d think minks and cat are on the same intelligence and awareness level.

> plants suffering

Yeah that’s a bit tenuous. I always see this argument as a reason not to do anything as a copout. We know that animals suffer and experience pain, you’d have to be really dishonest to say it’s not certain that animals experience pain at the very least. Plants on the other hand it’s really not obvious. From what we know, they don’t seem to. Of course it’s not 100% certain and it’s hard to conclusively prove a negative. But there is a lot more evidence towards animals being sentient and experiencing pain than there is for plants.

> number of animals saved

I’d say it doesn’t matter as much as you say it does. You seem to assume that it’s a choice between doing something with a lower impact and something with a higher impact. But I’m arguing that for the vast majority of people it’s between doing nothing at all and save no animals by changing their habits va doing something that might not be the single thing they could do to save the most animals but still spare a few. And with that, I am convinced that saving, say 5 animals a year by changing your habits vs saving 0 a year is a worthwhile improvement. Yes it’s not saving 100% of the animals from cruelty and suffering by making a bigger change in your life but it’s still something. And, again, I think that once you develop the awareness and go down that path it has a snowball effect in that individual’s habit. It makes that individual start questioning their lifestyle and society’s values which create a bigger impact than what it started with.

> dogs and cats eating the meat I don’t eat

I don’t think that’s true. My cat eats something like 300g of food per day. If I were to eat meat I’d eat a lot more than that in a day (that includes not only a steak but more insidious things like the gelatin in candies or desserts which usually comes form porks for instance, or the milk and eggs powder that is an additive in large numbers of products). It would take more than one pet to “absorb” the amount of animals I spare from ever being raised and slaughtered. There is a reason why the UN I’m has been saying for years that we must drastically lower our meat consumption if we want to keep feeding everyone! Part of it is because it’s a lot more efficient to eat the crops directly rather than have an animal eat them and lose the majority in the process (I don’t know the numbers off hand but it takes say 1000 kcal of crops to make 10 kcal of meat), but also because the demand for meat would drop and thus not require nearly as many animals raised for meat and eating crops we could feed people directly.

Furthermore, it’s not 100% comparable. Although dogs don’t need to eat meat (they can live healthily on a vegetables diet), cats don’t have this option. Their digestive tract is too short to process vegetal proteins so they must eat meat. Humans aren’t like that either. We can absorb vegetal proteins and there is no reason to eat all the meat we do. It’s not a requirement. Never mind the amount of antibiotics and hormones they come with that we also absorb. Or the effects of industrial animal farming in a pandemic. In the end of the day, choosing to not eat animals anymore has a larger impact than keeping feeding your cat meat. And the first one is totally doable while the second one would make the cat unhealthy. It’s still not saving as many animals as quitting animal products AND killing your cat so it doesn’t have to eat meat anymore but it’s a massive improvement if only your cat (1/30th of your weight) eats meat and you don’t vs you and your cat changing nothing and eat meat as usual.