Cats and dogs eat meat, isn't it hypocritical to have pets?

The objection

“You lecture people about meat, then open a tin of dead animals for your cat. Isn’t that hypocrisy?”

The answer

Start with the part that’s true. Cats are obligate carnivores: they need taurine, preformed vitamin A and arachidonic acid, which are hard to supply safely without animal-derived or carefully formulated synthetic sources. A vegan who feeds a cat carelessly can genuinely harm them. That tension is real, and there’s no dodging it.

Hypocrisy, though, requires a contradiction, and there isn’t one here. Choosing your own dinner and providing for a dependent are different moral acts. You can stop eating meat by an act of will; your cat cannot reason about ethics or consent to your principles. Meeting the genuine biological needs of a creature in your care is guardianship, the same way a parent feeds a child what the child needs rather than what the parent would philosophically prefer. Refusing meat for yourself while providing it to a being who requires it is the distinction working exactly as it should.

And for dogs, the factual ground has shifted. Dogs are dietary omnivores, and the largest guardian-reported study to date (Knight et al., PLOS ONE 2022) found dogs on nutritionally sound vegan diets had health outcomes at least as good as dogs on conventional meat diets. For dogs, the tension is increasingly just solvable.

For cats, the realistic answer is harm reduction rather than denial: diets using byproducts, cultivated meat as it arrives, and the harder question of whether deliberately breeding ever more carnivores into existence is wise at all.

Feeding a dependent what she needs is not the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy would be pretending that her diet settles what you should eat.