It would be much bigger news if vegans were killing their cats in mass in pursuit of a vegan diet. But it seems most of you are blinded by rage of otherizing people then wanting to have a discussion.
Now bring on the down votes because most of you ornery ones think just because it's sold on Amazon doesn't mean it healthy for cat or some shit idk. It looks like Benevo gets 200 orders a month those cats really sound like their starving.
You can feed cats a vegan diet and have them be healthy, but it is a pain in the ass to keep the cats healthy, something that most the owners do not do. They buy the food and feed their cats without doing the tests, and their cats suffer for it
You need to regularly test their urine ph levels about once every couple weeks in order to adjust their meals so they're getting the right nutrients.
I've seen one owner, one, where their cat is fed a vegan diet and is healthy, and it looks like a nightmare of hassle to go through because without the tests you don't know something is wrong until it is VERY wrong. And once you get the right food figured out for your cats, you still need to take them to the vet once a month to get their urine tested because the nutrients they need can change. And yes, if you go through all of this on average your cat may be healthier than one on a typical meat diet, but you're still dealing with monthly visits to the vet to maintain that diet.
My solution to all of this as a vegan is to not have a meat earing pet. Parrots are amazing. They're smart, they don't constantly think about murder, they're social and fun and live a long time.
Or bunnies, they don't need as much socialization as parrots do to avoid going crazy.
Dogs don't need near as much work to live on a vegan diet cause they're carnivores that adapted to being omnivores to be around humans over a very long period of time.
Yup totally! Just seems like a stretch from "cooking food is just making protein easier to digest" to, "chemically synthesizing elements that generally exist in a abundant state in the normal food source of an animal from vegetable sources and fortifying a plant based alternative that only gives macro nutrients we currentlt understand to be necessary for life".
That being said, if any plant based hormones were cheaper than the meat based alternative (all meat based cat food is also fortified in this way), the industry would switch to plant based and not tell anyone.
I would be extremely cautious giving a cat any of these products. Dry food is already not great for cats; it tends to be very carb heavy, and cats need a very low carb, high protein diet. On top of that, cats are obligate carnivores, meaning their wild diet is almost entirely animal meat, aside from the contents of their prey's stomachs (they will occasionally eat or chew some plants or grasses, but that's usually for their digestive tract, not nutrition). I'm very skeptical that you can give a cat a healthy diet with these vegan kibbles, which all seem to be mostly grains.