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.
Hi all,
For the sake of transparency, we are responding here, as remaining silent will also send a message to the community. We are actively reviewing all the information posted in this thread and all other linked sources. The entire team is being brought up to speed on the events that have taken place, but this process may take some time. We are all in different time zones, and many of us have professional and personal obligations that may take priority. Please bear with us, as there is a lot to review. We promise that after our review, we will respond to the community.
Thank you.
The FHF / LW Admin Team
Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods’ comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:
Edit: I am sorry, about my emotional decision i reinstated @Eevoltic and @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com as mods After researching myself, many sites say its not healthy, one (1) research paper says it is at least NOT unhealthy, but it has few points of data.
Personally, I’m not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki’s conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki’s level of disagreement with someone’s views at the given time.
Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word “misinformation” is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that “The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true”. If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators’ judgement by saying “Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules.”
Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World’s rule related to misinformation.
At least they admitted fault and learned a lesson.
However I’m also not adequately satisfied with this behaviour. This is an egregious example of someone not understanding how community works and then stepping in to boss them around about something they know little about.
I’m calling on the Lemmy.World team to appointment a vegan admin to oversee the community of !vegan@lemmy.world and for the removal of Rooki as an admin.
What the fuck is “vegan cat food”? I sometimes can’t understand people.
Ok. I get it. As people, we are bad. We mass husbandry just for food, modifying them with artificial selection for productivity. So I can understand veganism (although I am not vegan).
But have we really reached the point where we stop animals from eating meat? Either I’m a bigoted idiot or people are out of their minds.
Nobody is suggesting to stop animals in the wild eating meat or for incidental kills our furry companions make. Animals eat meat. It’s natural. We breed animals as pets and feed them industrial amounts of food each year that we produce from other animals in very questionable ways. Not natural. The entire planet benefits from less meat being mass produced. It’s not crazy to entertain some ideas that get us closer if they’re proven equally nutritional.
Then we should be against pets too. If we are not okay to breeding animals, we should also discuss pets too. That’s not natural either.
It is about pets, which are domestic animals who eat what you feed them. Choosing brand X of pet food prevents your pet from eating brand Y, I suppose, but every pet owner has to make such choices. Plant-based diets start to look like just another choice.
You really can’t stop cats from eating meat anyway, especially if you ever let them outside. They love to catch and eat mice, birds, and bugs, and they will do it no matter what pet food you might also give them.
I wonder if we feed our animals with “vegan food” for a year, would they start to choose that instead of meat or meat based food?
Man, I’ve had cats off and on my whole life.
You can offer kittens freshly weaned anything you want, and they’ll go after the stuff that smells right.
You can feed a cat any brand of food, and if they catch a bug or a rodent, or a bird, they may well eat it, or leave it on your pillow as a gift. Kinda rolling the dice which one tbh.
Cats are predators driven by instincts. A kitten rescued after being separated from its mother, raised by hand and then runs across something that sets off the prey drive will try to catch it. Adult cats that aren’t even hungry will engage in hunting behaviors because it just flips the right switches in their brain.
Animals? They have almost zero choice in their food. When they do have a choice, they’ll eat what smells right, and/or acts like food. You can’t train koalas to eat meat as their main diet, and you can’t train cats to not eat meat. At best, as an animal guardian, you provide them with limited choices, and they eat or starve (if the food isn’t close enough to being food for their instincts, they won’t even try to eat it).
Frankly, anyone taking a predator as a pet and not being willing to fulfill its basic needs is dumb. They’re choosing their wishes over the care of the animal, just to fulfill whatever belief it is they’re following.
You don’t want the animals in your care to not eat meat, don’t get animals that eat meat at all. No dogs, no cats, no snakes, nothing like that. Go adopt a bird that people didn’t know how to take care of and dumped at some rescue. Pick the animal companions that fit your life choices, don’t try and shoehorn yours into their existence.
In other words, vegans keeping meat eating pets are hypocrites because they’re exploiting animals for their own preferences and needs instead of the animals’
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.
Is this all over a disagreement on whether a cat can survive on a vegan diet?
That is my understanding based on Rooki’s own post, the post of the demoted vegan mod, and the modlog containing the removed comments.
Here’s the thread (archive link) that the admin intervened in:
@naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com, cats CAN NOT survive for long with a vegan diet. Its dangerous for them. Cats are carnivores.
Please refrain from removing warnings about such dangerous facts. Everyone who killed their cats by doing so, have a nice rest of your life knowing you killed your loved pet.
p.s. yes i am a cat owner.
Edit: to the rest of the mods: Dont promote harmfull things for pets. @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @Eevoltic are demoted.
If anyone else thinks pets should be vegan i have no problem banning them for being a troll and promoting killing pets.
Just that you heard it from me too: YES cats can survive vegan diet for few months but prolonged exposure and it gets harmful for the pet and even death.
Edit: This was in-between the comments by @Omniforous@mander.xyz being removed/restored
Yes, i wouldnt even stepped in if they didnt removed / added a warning about the risks of a vegan diet.
As a “clean” vegan diet without anything added to the food is poison for the cat as they are “Obligatory Carnivore” and need some Animal Proteins.
They wouldnt die immediatly but will cause malnutrition.
Technically it’s not proteins, but specific amino acids (which, yes, are the building blocks of proteins). And amino acid deficiencies will absolutely kill cats. Many years ago my parents used to buy the cheapest garbage cat food available at the local grocery store. It was nutritionally deficient, and ended up killing our only cat that was strictly an indoor cat at the time. (I don’t allow any of my cats outside, because I don’t want them to be food for owls and coyotes.)
What the hell. There’s just a disagreement, no need to use admin override powers. Just let it be. Let them have their sub. It’s not like they’re recruiting for Al Qaeda.
I really don’t give a damn about this particular fight about cat food. But I do worry about admins or mods who can’t sometimes just let something slide. Like cops always looking to escalate
Some of us do; Lemmy doesn’t display votes except to certain users, but that doesn’t make Lemmy votes private. Discussion here. PieFed apparently has a technique for keeping your votes actually private (mostly) from even the platforms that do display them.
Hey, check it out! I was right in thinking that the studies indicating good outcomes for the pets were poorly structured.
We found that there has been limited scientific study on the impact of vegan diets on cat and dog health. In addition, the studies that have been conducted tended to employ small sample sizes, with study designs which are considered less reliable in evidence-based practice. Whilst there have been several survey studies with larger sample sizes, these types of studies can be subject to selection bias based on the disposition of the respondents towards alternative diets
There aren’t studies saying that it is dangerous for the pets, which is a little surprising to me. Long story short the jury’s still out. But IMO it is completely fine for the admins of an instance to come down firmly against potentially animal-abusive practices, just as they would against political misinformation or nonconsensual pornography or what have you, regardless of how much in favor of those things are the members of the community promoting it.
While the study is not conclusive, that does not mean it is not a significant and useful piece of evidence. Conducted fairly and with acknowledgement of its flaws, it should be taken into account over the use of a simple classification system describing animals in their natural habitats.
I disagree that the admins should be fine coming down on anything they perceive as potentially abusive practices, as I think that sets a bad overall precedent.
Science is a continuously evolving thing, by design, and there is nothing wrong with using the best information that we have available at any given time.
I think it’s funny that the vegan mods in question pivoted effortlessly from “this is our place, fuck you, you are banned, we’ll decide what is and isn’t allowed” to “halp halp they’re censoring me, what about my human rights, you can’t do this”
What’s inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn’t justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.
It is a vegan community, that is where vegan views should flourish. A non-vegan admin stepped in and trampled on our free speech.
I think it’s funny they thought they could censor an admin. I fully support Rooki on this.
