cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18829828
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.
Anyone promoting paleo diets for cats or similar ideas is starting out with bad faith and needs to be dismissed. And for dogs too. If your argument is based on naturalistic fallacies or even traditionalistic fallacies, you should delete your account.
As vegans here should already know, just as a reminder of priorities:
The pet sector must die, pet ownership isn’t vegan, pet breeders are the enemies;
We’re not doing “optimal nutrition”, sorry. That biohacking shit to create immortal adopted pets isn’t going to work out. It’s hardly even clear for humans what the optimal diet is, and they pretend that they know what it is for cats??? These fools don’t even comprehend that evolution doesn’t give a shit about longevity. It’s a standard imposed by the marketing agencies of pet foods who want to milk pet owner feelings to have their pets die after they do. It’s a false standard that is great for advertising, but otherwise functions as a Nirvana fallacy machine.
This is just a rephrase, but pet ownership is bourgeois. Well, aristocratic, then bourgeois. Detach. This isn’t about you, you don’t get to annex a sentient being just to keep them as an emotional service slave or as a status symbol. This one is especially for Americans where pets live better than poor people.
You are a bit too gatekeepy for my taste here. Buying animals as pets from breeders is fucked up, yes. Stuffing cats full of vegan food that slowly kills them is as bad as feeding dogs raw animal carcasses because some shithead on the internet told you that this is the “natural” way.
But adopting street animals from regions where they are regularly abused and/or killed and with that helping to finance organizations who orchestrate castration programs in those places is not really “burgeois” or a way to “keep them an emotional service slave”.
It was a broad message. Some of it is for the vets who are essentially working for maintaining the pet industry and its market of pet ownership.
Firstly, we’re comparing “street food” to plant-based pet food. Not “ideal ambrosia for immortality food” to plant-based pet food. That’s the Nirvana fallacy I was referring to, your entire paradigm is wrong.
Secondly, everyone is mortal. Everyone. You too. Me too. If your plan is to create immortal animals, us included, your entire paradigm is completely wrong.
Hey! Speak for yourself.