Elephant 'smoking' footage baffles experts

Stimulants — or drugs in general, legal or not — should definitely not be assumed safe on a different species.

(Also: not all energy drinks are vegetarian, so wouldn’t always solve the diet puzzle even if you confirmed it as safe).

My cat refuses to drink Monster, but insists on Red Bull Blueberry.

They are finicky creatures.

Do a blood test. All vegetarians should do blood tests every now and then.

As an aside; I ate a vegan diet for 2-3 years and my B12 was fine. That’s not to say it would’ve been fine 2-3 years later, though.

Like the other commenter said— it was a blood test. The result was actually low hemoglobin. Low hemo unfortunately runs in the family as well– my mother has a severe case of anemia and suffers a range of issues related to that. Thankfully, I'm nowhere near that case.

I should have added that it's more complex than a simple low-B12. My blood work results have regularly shown low hemoglobin. It causes a lot of issues like inability to catch my breath, fatigue, and weakness as well as a foggy mind. The diagnosis was an Iron/B12 deficiency which is, IIRC, correlated. I don't have a ton of detail, myself. I had no leanings toward become a vegetarian so I didn't question his orders there. (edit: it's not completely related, but I'll note that my younger brother is vegetarian as his wife is vegan and he's as large as I am—maybe larger—and does just fine without poultry, red meat, or fish. Luck of the draw, it seems).

I'm certainly not saying there are no routes to surviving well as a vegetarian maintaining some form of anemia or other B12/Iron deficiency, but I'm assuming his direction was that due to its proven concentration.

I actually increased my diet of eggs, spinach, I'd long taken a cyanocobalamin orally daily before switching to a higher dose of methylcobalamin sublingual dose, and started eating yogurt.

I try and avoid an excess of cheese and grains because I simply don't need that much in the way of fats and carbohydrates in my current regimen.

Nutrition is complex, and I think it's generally accepted that acquiring nutrients through digestion is more reliable than supplementation. (so that I'm not saying this completely out of my ass, [0] [1])

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/nutrition-vitamins-on-trial-1.15...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-v...

I prefer Brewer's Yeast in a particular liquid form ;)

But I actually had to look up nutritional yeast as I hadn't heard of it here (Canada). It actually sounds like a promising supplement to my own diet. It seems like the only catch is that it doesn't produce B12 naturally, and I'll have to be sure to pick up the fortified version (unless they all are?)

Seriously too lazy to wikipedia 'cat' and depend on your biases?

It depends on what you mean by toxic, but most healthy animal foods contain basically zero antinutrients or toxins. (There may be a small amount environmental toxins.) Thus animals whose diets consist almost exclusively of prey do not evolve livers that are good at filtering out toxins.

While I don't mean to imply that all plants are going to be like poisons to cats at any dose, almost all plants do contain antinutrients, which can be potentially toxic at some dose to an obligate carnivore.

Most of the toxin load in omnivorous diets, including the typical human diet, comes from stuff plants produce naturally. This makes a lot of evolutionary sense; chemical defenses are the only ones plants have and there is usually a subtle mix of nutrients and antinutrients even in popular domesticated foods. Apple seeds contains cyanide. Wheat contains lectins and phytates that block mineral absorption. In India's largest chickpea producing region they have to put a price floor on chickpeas, otherwise poor people will eat enough of them to die. I am not exaggerating when I say that basically all plant foods contain antinutrients, and like anything it's the doses that makes the poison.

(Another subtlety is there are few pure antinutrients. I mentioned phytates, which can cause mineral deficiencies in humans at high enough doses. But phytates may also be protective against cancer. This doesn't change the basic argument I'm making about whether cats are designed to filter out all the chemical warfare that plants unleash, in significant doses.)

This is basic stuff, although contrary to many people's uninformed opinion. Feeding a bunch of plants to a predator is dangerous in the short term and abusive over the long term. I'm sorry I don't have any specific links for cats and liver toxicity specifically, but in general you can look to "The Killer Salad", which is a chapter in one of Michael Pollan's books, or to the writings of Paul Jaminet if you want to verify what I am saying bout the majority of toxins in mixed diets coming from plant foods.

Here are a couple of cat specific links that only mention the liver/toxin issue in passing, they look at the issue more broadly: https://animalwellnessmagazine.com/cats-cant-vegetarian/ http://messybeast.com/veggiecat.htm

If you google for example foods and plants that are considered safe for dogs to eat -- and then compare to cats -- you'll find the list of stuff that's safe for dogs is dramatically longer. Same thing for essential oils, many of them can be very damaging to cats in small doses. It's because of what I have explained above.. predator animals are not evolved to filter out stuff the way others are... they are designed to eat animals who have livers evolved to do the filtering for them. There are plants described as "safe" for cats to eat and you will occasionally see a cat eat small doses of random plants. They are talking about occasional consumption. But making any plant the staple of a cat's diet is cruel. Imposing ideology onto nature requires ignoring a lot of evidence.

The burden of proof should be on those who advocate feeding an animal something far different to its evolved diet. Still, there is lots of evidence that cats do poorly the more their diet gets away from not just animal foods but raw animal foods... I cited a well known study that's quite old above, but I'm absolutely sure you can find more evidence on this, if you care to.

I'm sorry, but describing the diet that scientists literally describe as "obligate" for cats as somehow being forced on them requires mental gymnastics I can't quite comprehend.

I think everyone is in agreement about what "vegetarian" means apart from you.

Vegetarians don't eat the flesh of animals, and it's always been like that. Eggs and milk are animal products, not the flesh of animals - so vegetarians can still eat them. Vegans don't eat animal products at all, which rules out eggs and milk. Pescatarians eat fish, but they aren't vegetarians.

So if N is the number of distinct foods you can eat, N(pescatarians) > N(vegetarians) > N(vegans).

Is there anything in particular about this that you find difficult to understand? I can model it as an ontology for you, perhaps?

As said above, I don't think anyone is confused except for you.

Don't get me wrong, I think vegans and vegetarians can sometimes be annoyingly hypocritical and arbitrary, I think I see what you're trying to get at, but as for what constitutes a typical vegetarian diet I don't see why it's so hard to see the difference between milk and meat.

I'm one of those people. Most people know what a vegetarian is. A few know what a pescatarian is. Hardly anybody understands what an ovo-lacto vegetarian is.

It's just way easier for me to say I'm vegetarian "but I eat fish sometimes". People get that.