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Los Angeles Proposes Vegan Diet For Homeless Dogs

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Homeless dogs at shelters in Los Angeles could be put on a vegan diet, but veterinarians are not convinced that’s best for the animals.

A rule proposed by TV screenwriter Roger Wolfson in the Los Angeles city council would force all animal shelters in the system to feed dogs completely plant-based vegan meals, the Washington Post reports.

“We have to embrace the fact that the raising and killing of animals for food purposes must only be done if we have absolutely no other choice,” Wolfson said at the council meeting in November. “This is about the long-term survival of every man, woman and child in this room, and all of the people in our lives.”

The rule also has backing of other stars, including Richard Hall, better known by his musician pseudonym Moby, who wants Los Angeles to lead on progressive causes.

“If we adopt this, it’s one more thing that proves to the world that Los Angeles really is the progressive capital,” Moby testified at a November meeting.

Los Angeles’ top veterinarian Jeremy Prupas had some misgivings about forcing all the dogs on a plant diet, and expressed concerns about meeting the nutritional needs of dogs in report to the council.

“We recognize that individual, privately owned dogs can do well on a wide variety of diets (Commercial, Vegetarian, Organic, Grain-free, Gluten-free, Raw, and Vegan),” Prupas’ report reads. “However, that is quite a different population than the group of dogs we encounter daily in our animal shelters.”

The dogs that go to shelters come from a range of diets, and are frequently stressed and often diverse nutritional needs, Prupas said. Wolfson replied that “the presence of meat contributes to that hysteria” in the dogs, but Prupas did not see any evidence in that claim.

Prupas also testified that when the shelters fed dogs all-vegan food provided by pet food marketing campaigns, it caused some problems: “In the past they fed vegan diets to the animals and it caused a lot of diarrhea,” Prupas said.

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