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They aren’t your companions, you are exploiting them for companionship. These meat eating pets can’t consent to a vegan diet, they are also not ethically required by their choice to not engage in the meat system.
That’s your choice, you are forcing that choice on an animal that isn’t getting anything from you they wouldn’t get with a non-vegan pet owner, your love isn’t special.
You could ethically choose to keep any number of naturally vegan animals. You selfishly choose to keep a cat or a dog cause you like them more.
Shit is messed up in my opinion and you buried the lead with your post. I’m glad other people were around to give context to this.
That’s not the greater good, that’s participating in the system that exists to support the pet industry at large. Vegans generally understand how these associations work since they track it so closely with the meat industry and it’s ancillaries.
If you want to argue harm reduction and greater good, there are literally millions of feral cats that feed on billions of birds a year and garbage. Spend your time trapping feral cats and getting them spayed or neutered, it takes a while but the only way to reduce the incredibly huge population of feral cats we have is to maintain their colonies but reduce their ability to reproduce.
That way new, un-spayed or un-neutered cats won’t move into the area where there’s already food resources (which happens with trap and release or worse options). Reducing the population of feral cats humanely is a net positive for the animals and society.
Adopting a cat from a shelter, no matter the state of that cat, isn’t a greater good. It’s a personal choice you made, it a selfish decision wrapped in a pretty box.