While it is true that felines are carnivorous in nature, having very short acid-filled intestines designed to rapidly break down recently dead or dying flesh, they are fully capable of digesting foods with sufficient enzyme proteins. As their bodies on their own do not produce enough of these enzymes to digest most plant products, their simply needs to be additional live enzymes present within within the food.

This is how the vegan cat foods work:

Plants + digestive enzymes = usable nutrition.

Incidentally, you do regularly see cats eating plants, as it helps to settle their stomach when it is upset.

As for dogs, they are omnivorous scroungers, just like raccoons or chickens or pigs, and will eat nearly anything.

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Also, this is the same for humans:

We need digestive enzymes to break down everything, plant or meat. For most people who follow any Westernised diet, they tend to lack enzymes and have troubles digesting. Enzymes are destroyed at fairly low temperatures, so things like cooking food, pasteurizing dairy products, etc. leave the food barren and hard to digest. The human body produces digestive enzymes and stores them, but it isn’t able to produce enough to make up for the food being completely without them. Enzymes supplies in the body run low, and little nutrition is extracted from the food.

It is sad how so many people on modern diets are overweight, yet at the same time they are nutritionally starving to death! This is the very reason why people are overeating — their food lacks the nutrients they are craving. So people keep eating and eating, trying to get the things their body desperately wants… only the nutrients aren’t actually in the artificially coloured and flavoured foods, it just seems to our senses (which are easily deceived), that it is actual “food”.

As time goes by, this reducing the nutritional value of food keeps increasing. They even had deep fried butter for sale at the P.N.E. this year — a truly disgusting mockery of actual food.

It is a sad game being played on the people of modern society. Education is the key to change!

In regards to relationships, I think that the same question can be asked about whether someone who believes in human rights would date someone who held violent beliefs about a particular group of humans or supported violence against a group of humans.

I think that the choice to unnecessarily harm animals can be considered in a similar way as the choice to unnecessarily harm humans, rather than considered like a personal choice about what music you listen to or what flavor of chips you prefer.

We do not need to eat or use animal products. We can be perfectly healthy without them. And all animal products are brutally violent to animals. The best justification I can think of for eating animal products is that they are tasty or convenient. Similarly for leather/wool/fur; we can wear something else.

So I can appreciate someone who would not want to date someone who, after careful consideration, thought that their own pleasure or convenience was a good justification for eating or using animal products and participating in unnecessarily harming animals.

This does not mean that vegans should police each other or work to exclude non-vegans from their lives. That would be silly.

@Patrick: I hope your transition to veganism goes well. If you are still thinking the issues through, the book I found most useful is Introduction to Animal Rights by Gary Francione. I recommend it highly.