In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki’s vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else’s position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don’t moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.
The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.
To summarize, even if you don’t agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content “promoting animal abuse” in the context of “excessive gore” and “dismemberment”.
For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki’s side and discussions of vegan cat food is “being a troll and promoting killing pets”, the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious “because it’s not scientific” and so on. Even reddit wouldn’t go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.
Given Rooki’s behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community’s trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.
Don’t know about cats, but can answer from dog perspective - I imagine it might apply to cats as well. And this is a completely utilitarian answer: food alergies. Animals can have them.
We have a dog who is alergic to most if not all most common meat proteins - chicken, pork, beef, fish… didn’t test all but you (and we) get the picture. Luckily, there are less common meat proteins (venison as one example) which he accepts just fine - but there was a distinct possibility he would not. So we would be faced with two options - buy him super expensive, ultra processed analergic food, or go for vegan options. If faced with this decision, I’d opt for option B for sure.
I know cats are seen as true carnivores and dogs are omnivores, but I think it applies to your question
That is not correct from a cat perspective. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Cats are. What this means is that the amino acids that cats can’t produce on their own are only available naturally from other animals. The amino acids that dogs don’t produce on their own are available from vegan sources.
And I clarified this. OP asked about animals, I have experience with dogs and acknowledged cats are different.
But I can imagine cats having similar conditions. There are always outliers and sometimes you have to do unconventional things.