So glad you posted this. As I don't understand it either, my dog is a meat eater- I am not. I'm okay with this as he was designed to eat meat. I know dogs can eat vegetables, my dog happens to love carrots, however I believe he should also eat meat as that is what his digestive system is designed for. I'm sure this a touchy subject for a lot of people but I don't think it should be,

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=29397.0

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=31821.0

Animal House isn't the place for this topic; please contact admin to request this thread be moved to the appropriate forum.

You are able to do this, as well. Just hit "report." It's already been done, though. There's just something weird about animal house, and it doesn't have any options.

I'm going to be egocentric and quote myself:

All I saw was stuff posted by vegans with an agenda. Anything by someone with a phd? Or a non-biased party? A link for a forum on vegweb, and then a link for a vegan trying to sell a book. Funny. I'd like to see a real scientific study.

From the newer edition of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Small-Animal-Clinical-Nutrition-Michael/dp/0945837054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271896307&sr=8-1
"Small Animal Clinical Nutrition"

"Much can be learned about an animal's nutritional requirements simply by analyzing its natural food source. True carnivores, such as cats, are limited to what is available from prey tissue such as skeletal muscle and liver to provide energy and nutrients, including protein, taurine, arginine, arachidonic acid, and niacin. Consequently, carnivorous animals (e.g. cats) developed more efficient pathways to use these nutrients, and have lost the ability or have a decreased ability to synthesize them from precursors. being omnivorou and feeding on a varied diet of plant and animal tissue, dogs maintained or improved the ability to synthesize nutrients from precursors. These differences lend more evidence to early evolutionary divergence and further support the premise that dogs are omnivores.
"Table 12-5 compares the recommendations for daily nutrient intake of adult dogs to the nutrient content of meat (ground beef). This comparison confirms that an all-meat food would be unbalanced for dogs."
"The characteristics of the canine small intestine are consistent with those of animals that digest an omnivorous diet. The small intestine composes approximately 23% of the total GI volume of dogs vs 15% for cats. The ratio of GI tract length to total body length is 6:1 for dogs, 4:1 for cats, 10:1 for rabbits, and as high as 20:1 for some herbivores. This anatomic relationship is consistent with ingestion of an omnivorous diet with intermediate digestibility (i.e., between low digestible herbaceous forages and highly digestible animal flesh). Dogs digest starch effectively via pancreatic enzymes and mucosal disaccharides."
There is no specific of vegetarian/vegan diets for dogs, however. But there is some for cats:
"Although the nutritional needs of cats are best met by a carnivorous diet, vegetarian diets can be designed to provide adequate nutrition. Vegetarian formulas are commercially available and several commercial supplements are available to provide nutrients normally missing, inadequate or poorly available in plant-based diets. The commonly reported pitfalls of commercially available feline vegan diets include taurine, arachidonic acid and vitamin A deficiencies. Several nutrients (below) require special attention in vegetarian formulations." (the nutrients are protein, taurine, B12, vitamin A , iron/zinc/copper if the food is high in phytates, and arachidonic acid). Cats have a higher total protein requirement than dogs (if I remember correctly, about 22-23% vs ~18% for dogs), and most foods for either animal far exceed this level. Excess protein is not beneficial, and it is suspected that it may contribute to chronic kidney disease (but this is debated).
Vegetarian/vegan diets are more of a concern for cats than dogs because of their meat-specific nutrient requirements.
They don't mention this in the book, but one of the risks for plant-based diets (at least for cats) is struvite urinary stones. Plant-based foods tend to be higher in magnesium and cause a higher urinary pH, which predisposes them to struvite stone formation. Some cats are more prone than others, though. I recall that the vegan-cat-food-people had to deal with this, and recommended getting a vegan cat's urinary pH tested periodically. (on the other hand, a low urinary pH can cause calcium oxalate stones, which is by a small margin the most common urinary stone in dogs & cats).

Basically, a vegan diet is not harmful to a dog if it is well-balanced (just like any diet). For cats, it's debatable. Some people have great success, others have issues with urinary stones because of high Mg/cats that are simply prone to it. I could see this is a more controversial issue if it was undeniably damaging to a cat/dog to eat vegan (and then you'd be choosing between who lives), but that's not the case.

But I feel that is equally appropriate for Animal House because it is an animal related discussion.

Food Fight is for debate.  Your original post was worded to spark discussion and debate.  That's one of the determining factors.  Yes, it's about animals, but it's framed around a discussion that we've had here multiple times before that either starts as, or it turns into, a debate - so some of it is just experience.

I don't have much more to add to faunablues--she's pretty much the animal go-to person. here. That being said, I want to point out that your assumption that dogs are carnivores is already flawed, thus the conversation is already skewed from the beginning. Dogs are not carnivorous--they do not chew their food in a carnivores' manner, their stomach acid is higher than a carnivores', their stomach is smaller, their digestive track is longer, etc. There are plenty of facts that prove that a dog is not carnivorous, it's omnivorous, just like humans. Please understand this fact first and foremost.

If we want to just talk about cats, then, who are carnivores, then this is a different discussion. I do not personally own a cat, so most of what I say will be anecdotal. I think it's deplorable that the US pretends to be this superpower, first world country, and we cannot even care for the smallest of animals, those that have no power and no voice. people toss aside animals like they toss aside last year's SUV or their leather purses. We don't respect the animals in our lives (and why would anyone, since they eat everything that comes into sight anyway?).

When I volunteered at my Human shelter in college, I wanted to take home every one of the animals everyday.
The people at the shelters are trying their best, but it's still not the right life for animals. I want to take them home and make their lives wonderful, let them enrich my life and I enrich theirs. It pains me to know that there are animals out there that are being euthanized when there are perfectly acceptable homes they could be living in. I will not contribute to pet overpopulation by buying an animal or breeding an animal, but I believe that if there are animals in need of love and a place to call home, then it's my ethical obligation to help out as many as I can. I am not able to adopt a cat at this time, so I can't directly discuss feeding meat to my cat.

My dog, however, is vegan. He's incredibly healthy and happy and full of energy. I don't feed him meat, because he's not carnivorous.

How does one reason veg*anism to a non-human?

You can't reason veganism to a non human but I think that thought is kind of irrelevant to this issue IMO... My animals are like my children, I make their food choices for them since they are unable to do so themselves.

Do you reject family and friends if they are not veg*an?

No is their a need to?