User blog:RRabbit42/Vegetarian cat people

This blog is an attempt to get a jump on a subject that may come up at some point in the future, which is, "Are any cat people like Mino vegetarian or vegan?" Before I can even attempt to talk about it, we start with the obligatory disclaimers.


 * 1) As of right now, this is probably not a question Bea R. has probably even thought of. She said in a recent Q&A post that she didn't think through questions like how did the world react when all of a sudden the population of human-sized beings exploded as all felines around the world changed into cat people.
 * 2) An answer from Bea R. about vegetarian or vegan cat people, either inside the comic or in a Q&A, may never be forthcoming. That was her response in the Q&A to those "I hadn't considered that" reader questions, so it likely applies to this one.
 * 3) I've never owned a cat and therefore might get some details wrong, so some of this may just be general statements instead of specifics. But I do know that more often, it's the cat that owns the human.

Background
In the 2000s, Animal Planet had a show called Animal Precinct, which had a camera crew follow animal cruelty agents of the New York ASPCA's Human Law Enforcement Division as they investigate reports involving animal issues.

In one of the episodes, the officers responded to a report of a cat that was going blind. What they found out was the owner was feeding the cat a vegetarian diet. It wasn't a case of "I'm vegetarian so my pet is going to be, too" or anything like that. She just thought it would be okay to feed her cat that kind of food.

The officers helped her understand that cats have nutritional needs that involve eating meat. The vegetarian diet meant the cat wasn't receiving the taurine it needed and that was leading to the cat going blind. It can also cause reproductive failures in female cats. At the time the episode aired, the importance of taurine to feline health was becoming more widely-known.

The good news is I think this was caught early enough that the cat could recover once it was started being fed a proper diet.

Proper vegetarian cat diets
Since then, synthetic taurine and other substitutes for the amino acids cats need to stay healthy have become more readily available. It's also possible to buy or make your own vegan cat food. So it's theoretically possible for a cat to be vegetarian or vegan. The difficulty seems to be in it's a bit more expensive and it relies a lot on getting your cat to cooperate.

The latter can be the entire sticking point. Cats can take one sniff of a new food and blacklist it forever. But if you luck out and find one or more vegetarian or vegan recipes that keep your cat properly healthy, there's still the chance they'd fall off the wagon and go hunt a bird or mouse.

Vegetarian/vegan humans compared to cat people
Humans have the ability to decide what types of food to eat based on nutritional information. When the felines were transformed into cat people in this comic strip, they gained a lot of human abilities and making decisions like that would be one of them. So again, it's theoretically possible that cat people could decide to have a vegetarian or vegan diet.

How likely is that to happen? Probably not very likely.

Remember, this is a subject Bea R. hasn't yet considered. It may never come up in the comic, and it may never be addressed in any way.

That leaves us with what has been shown in the comic, which is cat people have kept their carnivore instincts from when they used to be felines, and that's carried over to the children they've had since the comet transformed them. Some examples are:


 * First Q&A, part 1: Mino's favorite type of food is fresh fish.
 * "Birds of a feather": Mino intensely watches a bird for several hours on the railing just outside the apartment, but doesn't go after it.
 * "Chicken Run": Mino captures a woman in a chicken costume and wants Rupert to devour the woman with her, even though Mino seems to know that it's a woman and not a huge chicken.
 * "The cat next door, part 1": The first time Mino met Mister, Mister had caught a live bird and was holding it in his mouth. He apparently wanted it to be his friend, but it flew away when Mister said hi to Mino.
 * "A prince and a pauper": Mister demonstrates his cat fickleness when he's not interested in having the exact same expensive meal for lunch that was his favorite the week before.
 * According to the prologue, the comet transformed felines into cat people twenty years ago. Mister is around 5 years old (see Second Q&A, part 1), so that means he inherited his cat instincts from his parents.

Given those examples, cat people are probably carnivores and have no qualms about eating meat. Any that might switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet may or may not stick with it, depending on their mood.

So there you have it. While technically possible, my feeling is the chances of any of the cat people becoming vegetarian or vegan is pretty small.