I know I know… “obligate carnivore”
But here they are, making a direct immoral action to force their chosen diet on another being who in all likelihood would NOT choose themselves.
This is the single worst argument you could make.
Every single pet owner does that. Would any animal - including farm animals - choose to eat what humans provide them? Surely [cheapest store brand] wouldn’t be popular if they had a choice.
Would any animal - including farm animals - choose to eat what humans provide them?
Good question when it comes to pets. “Would you rather have to go out and hunt every day to get enough to eat, or just eat the canned stuff I give you?” I know I’d take the canned stuff, but who knows what individual pets would choose.
I’ve seen this choice play out with my own cats. I live in a 120+ year old farm house, and both cats came from my in-laws farm and therefore are familiar with catching mice. Every fall at least one mouse makes its way into the house to try to escape the cold and meets its end with the cats. They ultimately choose to eat the cat food (I generally go for Purina because its available at multiple local stores and decent quality) and chase the mice to death, which we ultimately have to toss into the yard to dispose of since they choose not to eat the mice.
So in their case the preference would be, “Let me hunt stuff for fun, but gimme the canned food so I don’t have to actually eat them.”
Yeah, with the added factor of convenience this will probably change - but you could extend it to vegan food with supplements and the choices probably wouldn’t change significantly.
My thought was to provide a pet with the choice of:
- store brand food
- alive prey in a cage
to remove any aspect of (in)convenience. By that metric, I think nearly all carnivores would choose the prey. Except maybe if your pet happens to be a vulture.
Then the inconvenience is moved to the owner, who must now either hunt the prey every day or buy it from a store (and the infrastructure isn’t there to supply every cat or dog owner with live prey to buy, not to mention the cost). Realistically, if the pet is going to be provided food and shelter by the owner, canned food is part of the deal. The fact that the average pet cat or dog lives around 3 times longer than ones in the wild makes it seem like the canned food doesn’t negatively affect the pet much.
