Believe it or not, my dog, a Lapso loves Tofu, carrots, lettuce, just about everything I eat, he eats.  I haven't found anything he won't eat.  So I would say my dog is a great vegan.  He is very healthy as well,  and  he is 16 years old in people years.  Lapso's can live to be up to 28 year of age in people years.  God Bless them.

Sharing a vegan diet with your pet is irresponsible, unless your pet is naturally a vegetarian animal.

But a dog?  Dogs are carnivorous and are predominantly meat eaters.  So feeding them diets rich in meat products makes sense.

Of course, this clashes with important vegan issues such as Factory Farming.  However, it's easily justified with 2 possible solutions that I can think of.

1.  The slaughter of animals to feed your pet is justified because your pet would naturally eat animal flesh.  It's not justified for human consumption as humans are naturally mostly vegetarian.  If the thought of factory farming is ok with you as a means to feed your pets, then deal with it.

2.  (Where I stand) - Responsibly feeding your dog requires the slaughter of animals, almost always in factory farm conditions.  Enslaving pets in unnatural conditions for our enjoyment is already kind of sick, no matter how much we "think" our dogs  have human emotions and really love living with us.  The solution is easy - don't have pets, especially ones that require the factory farmed slaughter of animals to feed them.

ManzanitaBear wrote:

Dogs can be kept healthy on a vegan diet if it's balanced right for them.  They naturally eat more vegetable matter than you would think, even if they're not strict vegetarians.  And their systems are similar enough to ours that they can eat most of what we can eat.  Humans can do well on a vegan diet, so why not dogs?  Like dogs, humans are capable of eating meat, and don't do well on a vegan diet if it isn't well balanced with a variety of foods.

The animal that can't is cats.  I HOPE no one takes this thread as encouragement to feed their cat a vegan diet!  Cats are natural carnivores, and they could not tolerate a diet entirely of plants.  It would kill them if they were never fed meat.

I just read a great article on this subject.  I wish I could post a link, but I accessed it via an academic database available to me as a university student.  It appears you are right in that dogs are natural omnivores and cats are natural carnivores.  The article however contests the notion that cats cannot be kept healthy on a vegan diet.  I quote: "To the body, it is immaterial whether the basic building, energising and replacing materials are derived from a meat or chicken source or from a soybean or seaweed source. What matters is that the basic cellular structure is the same, irrespective of the source."

In other words, protein is protein regardless.  You do have to be careful though.  It would be very difficult with a cat's nutritional needs to prepare good homemade meals.  A vegan preparation for cats would need to be supplemented with taurine, arginine, vitamin A, niacin, vitamin B12, and arachidonic acid.  (You may be wondering about the vitamin A.  Beta carotene is found in plant sources, which is converted to vitamin A by humans and dogs, but cats cannot make this conversion.)  These nutrients are not found in sufficient quantities in plant sources for cats.  In any case, the issue of "vegan cat food" is still open to debate.