All of Karthik Sekar's Comments + Replies
I love the story and helpful summarization of Singer's mindset. His emphasis on the truth and listening to your detractors is an inspiration.
Reading an essay from him in college was my first step toward appreciating animal welfare and steering my life accordingly. I can't imagine how different my focus would be if it weren't for Peter Singer.
Thanks Cornelis, I agree about the empirical evidence. And indeed, emphasizing Ami and how long it's been around would have obviated a lot of confusion here.
We seem to disagree about (1) the variance of meat-based retail products versus vegan ones and (2) whether or not the "trial-by-fire" standard is more helpful than just simply the criteria that AAFCO/FDA defines regarding nutritional, toxicity, digestibility, and safety.
(1) Sounds like your priors for the intra-variance of meat-based cat food are lower than the inter-variance between validated me...
Thanks Cornelis, I sincerely appreciate the good will shown.
For me: I agreed with you and felt like my mind was being changed to being pro-vegan-cat - until I read Elizabeth's comment pointed out the issues in the study. So for me it is mostly because you haven't engaged with that specific comment and pointed out why the concerns that are highlighted in her screenshots (from the actual study!) are not something that I need to worry about.
I conceded on Domínguez-Oliva et al., and Elizabeth's concerns were entirely valid. However, it's one study and one diet...
She meant the diet that we have the most empirical evidence doesn't harm/kill them.
We don't have empirical evidence of the same happening with meat-based diets.
Do we have empirical evidence that a specific meat-based food is consistently safe over many years? My understanding is that many change constantly.
So modern nutritionally complete meat-based diets presently have a 100%-wont-cause-major-adverse-health-outcomes rate. Is this not what the studies seem to show?
Not really. Check out the recall withdrawals over the year: https://www.fda...
Something weird and unexpected like the NO pathway could explain why cats on vegan diets still get health issues as the pro-vegan study Elizabeth linked to shows.
But we have the same uncertainty with retail meat-based cat food, which I've highlighted is quite distinct from what cats evolved on.
An escape hatch from this would of course be lab grown meat that is to the molecule identical to meat.
I don't understand the obeisance to molecularly-exact meat. Evolution doesn't select for health and well being. It selects for propagation for a specific niche in a ...
Feed animals close to their natural diet while researching how to do better. You dismiss this as "appeal to nature", but I would describe it as "the burden is on the attempt to change the default".
"Meeting nutritional requirements" is a far better default standard than what's "natural". Few problems with the "natural" standard:
- Retail based meat cat food is far from what's "natural" as I covered in the post.
- What's "natural" isn't more equivalent to what's healthy. Is a diseased bird corpse more "natural" than nutritionally-complete vegan c
Thanks Lilly. FYI, as far as tractability goes, I ask for ingredient approvals and a few RCTs. These wouldn't require much in terms of cost (~1 million USD). There's millions of vegans around the world, and I bet many are relishing the opportunity to rear vegan cats, including myself.
I also want to flag another ancillary benefit that developed in the days since discussing this post with others: Many folks understand the ethical and environmental benefits to going vegan, but won't do so themselves because of perceived health concerns. If "carnivore" cats ca...
Okay, it sounds like your argument is "vegan cat food is capable of meeting the same standard as meat-based food".
Indeed.
From skimming the AAFCO document it's not obvious to me AAFCO thinks meeting its standard is sufficient for health (see screenshot below, from page 2).
As you pointed out earlier, we don't know everything that we could know. What do you propose we do? It sounds like your concerns are with food testing for cats period, and they're not specific to the vegan formulations.
My stance is that if it's okay to feed cats meat-based food, then it's fine to feed them vegan food.
You say you've done research satisfying you that this is all biochemistry and we know everything we need.
To be clear, this is not what I'm arguing. Biochemistry research is never complete. I'm arguing that it's safe to feed cats vegan based on what's known.
Can you write that up?
Here's the AAFCO list of required nutrients for cats and what I view as authoritative (pages 13-14):
Okay, it sounds like your argument is "vegan cat food is capable of meeting the same standard as meat-based food".
From skimming the AAFCO document it's not obvious to me AAFCO thinks meeting its standard is sufficient for health (see screenshot below, from page 2). Perhaps there is something I missed, but I have put a lot of time into reading papers I found shoddy and you didn't find worth defending, so I would like to be sure this why you believe what you believe before investing more time checking it out.
The argument isn't solely based on the survey data. It's supported by fundamentals of biochemistry, metabolism, and digestion too. I won't presume to know your biology knowledge. Earlier, you said "biology as a field is dumb", which may or may not be indicative of much personal study of biology. So I apologize if this is over-explaining, but I feel that I may have glossed over it when making the post:
Mammals such as cats will digest food matter into constituent molecules. Those molecules are chemically converted to other molecules--collectively, metabolism...
Could you provide a source for this? In biology, "obligate carnivore" means "obligate meat eater". They cannot get sufficient nutrition from plants alone. This doesn't rule out an artificial diet providing the missing nutrients, or someone incorrectly classifying a non-obligate carnivore as obligate due to bad data. But it does not mean "based on observation".
I could have the official definition wrong--I edited the post. I'm thinking about it colloquially and repudiating how it's conceived for example here.
I agree that the paper you highlighted is not maki...
This is not a semantic issue you can fix with a minor edit. Your post rests on the assertion that cats can be healthy when fed an exclusively plant-based diet, and that these diets are already available. You are sure enough of this to say we should "stridently correct" people who believe they can't.
You can claim people are wrong to categorize cats as obligate carnivores, but you need to demonstrate that with evidence, which you absolutely have not done. You say the best evidence is survey based, but with such a motivated population and minimal report...
- Yes, I agree that we need more studies and more science here. The limitation is funding. I am campaigning for that.
- Another comment brought up a similar point, see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AFPXXepkgitbvTtpH/getting-cats-vegan-is-possible-and-imperative?commentId=yM9hvEHYHwJnZ7PfM
- Evolution-based, appeal to nature arguments aren't good. As I suggested in the post, please see the first chapter of After Meat which discusses in detail. Key points: (1) Evolution doesn't select for optimal health; it selects for propagation. What cats evolve
Hi Jeff, I heard back from Andrew Knight who researches this issue. His findings suggest that it's not actually an issue. I updated the post. He highlights this link: https://sustainablepetfood.info/vegetarian-feline-diets/#4
I love cats too. They're my favorite companion animal.
Yes, they tend to be sociopathic and terrorize prey. I'm reminded by what Sam Harris said on a podcast regarding sociopathy: We should look at it as a disease to intervene on. We should want to treat/mitigate sociopathy.
As other commenters noted, keeping cats inside or placing collars on them to alert/avoid prey are important practices.
I don't dispute that. We want to make it as convenient for folks as possible to feed their cats vegan.
I'll reach out to my vegan pet food contacts and see if they know.
Dogs eat more meat than cats in the United States. So in terms of magnitude, dogs are a bigger issue.
Currently, it seems to be easier to rear vegan dogs. There's more retail options and more studies. Furthermore, dogs are perceived as omnivores, and so the concerns about feeding them plant-based food are less acute.
As far as where to put our resources, I think, yes, in the long run, we'll probably want to focus more on dogs, but we're in a terrible place right now with respect to cat food. I think modest resources here could do much good. If we had m...
A cat I used to have would wear a collar with a bell when she went outside. It seemed to alert all of the birds around her.
Yes. I hesitated from forecasting an exact value for how decrease in consumption of meat by cats affects deforestation. It's hard due to the way animal agriculture divides up a carcass and sells the different parts. We almost have to look at cat food as a subsidy to eliminate from animal agriculture. The true reduction will depend on the elasticity of demand.
Furthermore, the asks here are modest: Wouldn't surprise me if even ~$1M can fund, say, 10 ingredient approvals and 1 RCT.
Re: Source of meat: I am not sure. I was just suspecting maybe (maybe not) cats might tell from the taste better than humans? But I hope not.
It could certainly be true with initial vegan cat food recipes, but then our goal would be to figure out why cats prefer the meat option and then to close that gap by developing new vegan formulations.
Both can be true. We keep them more indoors and have them eat more vegan.
Also, if cats are not fed natural meat, is there a chance they might hunt more, if allowed outdoors?
Why would the "naturalness" of the food matter? Perhaps if it's more satiating, then cats are less inclined to hunt. But satiation is independent of whether or not it's from animal flesh.
Also, maybe keeping cats indoors is easier to promote than feeding them vegan feed?
Apologies if it's not clear above. My main point is that we should strive to be making it easier to feed cats vegan.
Hey Johannes, thanks for this. I think that transitioning the world from consuming animal products is imperative, so I'm in favor of trying such a project. And I think it would be well-worth funding and setting up to collect useful data.
Some other considerations:
- How will people be enticed to such a program / courses? As the other comment says, most people who would join would already lean plant-based. But what about a cook together and eat together situation and make it like a social meetup?
- For families, they might be helped by more meal plans and ba
Alex, I appreciate the thoughtful comment and all of the edits. I gave you an upvote, but I'm still far from convinced that this is worth EA's time and money. Most of what you've written so far as convinced me that poor, unstable governance is the ultimate pathology to treat, and Bitcoin is a potential ointment for (some) resultant symptoms. I know EAers work on improving election and democracy systems. A few more follow up thoughts on a few of your remarks:
Responding to (3) and (5): Sure, I see other issues that need to be worked out, for example, governm...
I'm still unclear on the problems that Bitcoin is solving versus fiat. I can also imagine many issues that Bitcoin has that fiat doesn't. This post is a one-sided take, and it'd be more honest to put both the disadvantages/advantages side-by-side by fiat. There are clear advantages to our current system that we'd give up by switching more to Bitcoin; for example, if I lose my banking account login information, I can recover it with the help of a customer service representative. Whereas if I lose my wallet keys, I'm screwed.
Furthermore, fiat benefits the po...
Hi Richard, I recently wrote a post that tackles the concern on whether personal choice on veganism can have meaningful consequences: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aMFFWhiQX5DvaZSDp/the-tipping-point-case-for-vegan-advocacy
Short answer, yes. Personal choices can help shift the S-curve for the transition, which has huge consequences.
Indeed. To be clear, when I refer to publications, I refer to traditionally published ones: where the papers are submitted to journals, editors will determine if it's impactful enough, and then it's sent out to review. This is such a belabored process, especially in the age of the internet. And for what it's worth, the competition is exacerbated by the lack of space in lofty journals.
And sure, we can't jettison publications without something taking it's place. It still could be papers, just not traditionally published ones. We saw this play out durin...
Thanks for this post. I agree with many of your points. I see science as a problem-solving engine, and yes, if it's not operating as well as it could be then that's a huge opportunity cost for issues such as treating diseases, transitioning to clean energy/meat, etc.
One thought about the publishing and incentives: If funders can be convinced not to care about publications or to weigh other efforts the same or more, e.g. posting and commenting on pre-prints, then that could break the strangle that the publishing industry holds on the scientific enterprise. ...
Private funding for alternative food is eye-popping, to say the least. "Buzzy" is a good descriptor :)
I hesitate to make any proclamations on what's too much or too little, as it does depend on the counterfactual. I think the problems that Beyond Meat are trying to solve are worthwhile. Giving them cheaper capital helps their efforts. Glad it's going there versus, say, Palantir.
I spent Chapter 9 discussing specific funding opportunities, but I thought of a couple of ones since the book went to the presses:
- Fundamental characterization of casein and ca
The details will matter as far as what will have the most impact.
If she's starting another plant-based burger or milk company, a la Beyond Meat or Oatly, then I'd say she can't add so much value because there's already a ton of activity solving that problem. But if she has novel solutions; for example, a new way to make semi-solid lipids at scale, then she can add a lot. Semi-solid lipids are a problem for nearly every alternative food effort; there two "natural" options with coconut oil and palm oil. Also, for what it's worth, many of these companie...
The reports largely echo my worries about the tractability and feasibility of cultured (in vitro) meat. When I talked with my friend at GFI about it, she sent me this post that GFI authored, in particular responding to the Counter article: https://gfi.org/cultivated/tea-statement/
The post indicates that there's more information beyond what's available publicly and that these companies and investors are well-versed with the challenges. I know the post rings of a "trust us; we know what we're doing" sentiment and asks for a lot to be taken at face valu...
Jakub, thank you for this piece. I loved it when I first read it, and I find myself coming back to it often.
I also appreciate how much the EA movement has normalized eating vegan. In 2013, only about 25% of professors in ethics reported to not eat meat. So, it's striking and quite the signal that every EA event I've been too (2 EAGs, 1 EAGx, many small ones) has served fully vegan food.