I know I know… “obligate carnivore”
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.
Yes, and in that case there’s no problem with what type of food the owner provides, as long as it contains enough nutrients, right?
I’m fully aware that it is completely unreasonable for humans to provide the same food to a pet as it would eat in the wild. But since we are deciding what our pets should eat anyways, we can give them whatever food that provides enough nutrients. There is nothing immoral about taking away a pet’s choice - it never had one to begin with
