Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php
Credits: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
484 points (94.5% liked)
Comic Strips
23570 readers
1934 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
-
😇 Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
-
🏘️ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
- Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
- Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
- Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
-
🧬 Keep it Real
- Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
-
📽️ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
- Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
-
📋 Post Formatting
- Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
- Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
✅ Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
❌ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
-
📬 Post Frequency/SPAM
- Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 🖐) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 🖐) will be removed.
-
🏴☠️ Internationalization (i18n)
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
Sí, por favor [Spanish/Español]
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
-
🍿 Moderation
- We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
- When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists
The following artists are banned from the community.
- Jago
- Stonetoss
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
Web of Links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The idea of what would happen to livestock if meat was outlawed was something I never contemplated in my early activist years. It’s a conundrum for a well intentioned vegan. There’d inevitably be a black market, or a lot of poaching of game. Most production meat animals live in CAFOs, not fields, and are entirely dependent on that system. There’s not enough range to let them go live their lives out, and if you did loose them on the range, the ecological impact would be horrific. Nobody’s going to feed them for the rest of their lives out of the goodness of their hearts, and those that would could never afford to do so. We also waste a lot of farmland feeding them in the first place. And then there’s companion animals. Cats are obligate carnivores and while dogs can survive on a vegan diet, they shouldn’t be forced to do that. I’ve met a lot of radical vegans but I’ve met very few (literally, like two) who opposed the idea of humans cohabitating with a cat or dog on the grounds any coexistence is exploitation. So without dog/cat food, what’s your choice? Let them hunt on their own? Well most dogs won’t, and we all know how bad domestic cats are for native wildlife. I have no clean solution for all this, only that harm reduction is the goal. And I’ll take my lumps from the idealists who think reduction is half-assed.
You can have cows on just land with no feed outside of winter hay you grow locally. You just have to have drastically lower herd population and they're leaner and smaller. Basically double the price. But not unreasonable.
True. And forgive my American perspective, but from an indigenous species perspective, those liberated herds shouldn’t be competing with our native wildlife for that space from a restorative environmental point of view. I’m in wild horse country, some of the earliest equine fossils are from my state, but their domestic-turned-wild descendants were non-existent here before the Spanish brought them over. Wild horses have found a niche and between human history, colonist as well and indigenous, have a place in our story. They’re problematic; they’re iconic. Unleashing domestic cows to go roam would present a whole slew of new problems. Look at what feral hogs have done, or how pythons have impacted Florida, or on the vegetation side, what cheatgrass has done to our sagelands. All this is human hubris. Even if we can recognize our fuck ups were not going back to what it was before, but how do we not keep making the same mistakes over and over even if our intentions are noble?
The answer is bison
But to the problem of converting to veganism on a larger scale, I think you’d just gradually phase out by banning further breeding and the cow population could dwindle down. It wouldn’t solve a lot of the other adjacent problems though.
Like, send bison to kill the cows? Or the cows will go live with the bison? If the answer is bison, in not sure what the question is.
In the US the native herbivore with the "cow-niche" is the American bison. If we would restore ecosystems and replace captive grazers with wild grazers, increasing the wild bison population is the answer and much preferable to having wild cows (who don't even exist in the first place, the wild version is extinct as mentioned). Of course bison is not an answer to what to do with the cows that already exist in the US of course.
However if a decision was made to ban all animal agriculture I would be a strong opponent of not rewilding any cows. They are not native and they are not even fit for living in the wild anymore. Just take a Holstein milking cow for example. What use does producing 40liter of milk per day have in the wild? None! Calves can't drink even close to that amount. The lactating moms would get mastitis. They are not even fit to only make milk for just their calves anymore. Let the domestic cows die out in that case.
Wild agricultural cow would be pretty easy prey for wolves and cougars. They're too different from native auroch or Buffalo. The Indian and moreBuffalo. Skinny cows can do well in warmer climate though compared to furry buffalo, they're much closer to the auroch style.
"Tasty free range steak" perhaps?
Not anymore. Scientists solved that problem by creating synthetic taurine, which was the last nutrient making cats obligate carnivores. If obligate carnivore means you can't feed it a healthy vegan diet, then that's gone. They're not obligate carnivores anymore. We used science to destroy that law of biology.
Seriously though, if someone doesn't want to have a carnivore as a pet, just don't get one then, there's plenty of animals that make great pets and are also "vegan". Rabbits for example are really personable and can be a great alternative as a free roaming house pet
Synthetic taurine does not stop cats from being obligate carnivores, it just provides a non-animal based amino that fits their digestive needs. And that’s great for cats that cohabitate with responsible, mindful humans. But it doesn’t suppress millions of years of gut instinct that drives them to hunt nor make them incapable of digesting animal based foods. If they weren’t obligate we wouldn’t be obligated to engineer a work around.
You're talking about an essential definition. I'm talking about a functional definition. If the conversation is about cats in captivity, essential definitions don't matter. The only thing that matters is the functional definition. Cats were functionally defined as obligate carnivores because it helped people communicate the fact that you can't feed a cat a healthy vegan diet. That's no longer true, so it doesn't need to be communicated, so the functional definition no longer applies.
Essential theories of truth suck because they don't help you solve problems. Pragmatic theories of truth are awesome because they help us solve problems. According to a pragmatic theory of truth, cats are no longer obligate carnivores, because scientists made synthetic taurine.
They still don’t cease to be functionally obligate, you’ve just changed the definition of carnivore. Nothing about the cat itself changed, its body still requires an amino that previously was only available through animal flesh. And the designation “obligate carnivore” wasn’t an anti-vegan communication, it was an observation because we didn’t invent cats, or even quite domesticate them, they sorta coexist at various levels with humans depending on how we choose to shape that relationship.
But here’s my question when it comes to animal cruelty with regards to companion animals, which aren’t something most vegans argue in favor of abolishing but rather advocate for treating as peers. You can feed a cat synthetic taurine, you can keep a cat inside, neutered/spayed, but you still haven’t changed what a cat is- a half-domesticated predator that shares a life with you. They don’t have the thousands of years of selective breeding dogs have. Where’s the point that human intellect and good intentions to reduce harm comes full circle and ends up being unintentionally cruel because you end up forcing human values on a non-human entity? Your cat doesn’t understand human definitions of what drives it or how its digestive system works, it just does cat things. If you want it to not be a cat, you have to create not-cats, which is an entirely different animal than what we have and doesn’t solve the problem of all the stray/feral cats that do exist. Do we cull them? Collect and sterilize them until eventually they age out and go extinct? It’s the same dilemma of livestock. Without human intervention they wouldn’t exist as we know them, but now they do exist, but they’d have no real need to exist nor should they be released into the wild should we chose to discontinue our relationship. Even in the places where their wild ancestors roamed, those ancestors and the environments that shaped them are for the most part lost, and a dairy cow is not an aurochs in a post-glacial European forest, and never would have been what came next if left to the normal pressures of nature/climate/environment.
I don't necessarily agree with your argument here either because cats love junk food as much as humans and will live on nothing but friskies gravy if you let them.
That cats don’t understand the nutritional value of a free meal doesn’t mean they’ve lost their instinct/drives to engage in feline behavior. Not every kill is because they intend to eat it, the internet is full of pictures of people grossed out because their cat brought them a half dead rodent, bird, or snake. Barn cats often lean more on the feral side but will still take you up on a free meal if provide it. The toys we buy for our pet cats are designed around engaging their predatory behavior and channeling it into not lethal play. If you keep a cat locked inside and are its only source of food, it will eat whatever you provide and adjust its behavior to the life offered. If you don’t provide opportunities for enrichment and feed it garbage it probably will end up unhealthy and obese, but I’d still question how often it’s seeking to alleviate it’s boredom stalking and killing bugs when you’re not looking. One of the biggest concerns for wildlife is that cats are domesticated enough to understand the convenience of a human-sourced bowl of free food to fill their bellies but being well fed doesn’t suppress the instinct to hunt. They’ll kill when the opportunity arises because they have the instinct to and it alleviates boredom even if they have no intention of eating it. You’re correct that the responsibility is on the human, because the human understands all this and is responsible for controlling the environment and diet.
This is true for any animal kept in captivity. If you’re the only source of food eventually they will eat what’s available even if it’s detrimental. If you don’t provide for their behavior needs they’ll indulge those drives in ways you don’t want. Dogs will dig, shred, and develop anxiety. Parrots will pluck themselves naked. A lot of fish and reptiles won’t eat the wrong thing and have a low tolerance for the wrong environment, they just die.