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Cake day: June 27th, 2024

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  • The difference is that you as the owner are in that case not actively financing an industry that’s slaughtering other animals in order to feed your pet.

    That a cat while roaming outside will inevitably kill other animals is not unethical on the cats part. It’s debatable if it’s unethical on the owners part, which is why many people nowadays discuss only keeping cats as indoor pets anyway. It is however a completely separate issue to vegan cat food.

    Maybe you think vegans ask for vegan pet food because they want their cat to “be vegan”? Because if so, that’s a misunderstanding. Vegan ethics are always about our own consumption decisions and behavior. Never about those of animals. (Which is why “dO yOu JuDgE LiOnS fOr KiLliNg ZeBrAs As WeLl?” is never a good argument. We don’t.) As caretakers for our pets some of their decisions naturally fall to us. You’re always deciding for them which brand of pet food your cat will get. For example I avoid nestle owned brands, wether my cat supports that decision or not. If he was an outside pet I’m sure he would at least try to murder something occasionally. That has nothing to do with my responsibility to honor the ramifications of my own ethical considerations though. My cat is too dumb for that - literally. It doesn’t release me from the responsibility.

    (He gets meat btw, he has chronic digestive problems and needs special food anyway - before anyone here accuses me of murder and torture or something.)




  • Ironically, behind all this is a misconception that we’re actually constantly working on with our patients. The truth is that the clinics would function better and we could offer better therapy if, for example, we weren’t so overworked and enough staff were employed. But in order to achieve this, we would have to make decisions again and again in specific cases, which are less pleasant for patients in the short term. Specifically: saying no to our employers more often, strikes, and in the worst case resignation. Sensible in the long term, unpleasant in the short term. For our patients. And that’s the crux of it.

    Unfortunately it is always easier to discover those mistakes in the thinking of others. I have met dozens of colleagues who avoid fighting for better working conditions for precisely these reasons (while advising their patients to avoid this error in particular). And clinics of course know this and take advantage of it.

    So better negotiation skills are really only party of the solution (although also very important). I think in the long term we need better education and more focus on socialist ideas, specifically on how and why employee rights (and the ability to self-care) are such an integral requirement to a job well done.


  • That’s an interesting one. As a psychotherapist from Germany I can say we’re definitely not low paid, but it is much less than other academic professions, and especially in relation to the time it takes to get qualified (roughly 10 years) and the cost of approbation itself (varies from 30k-160k, and that’s in a country where education usually is free) it’s really not a good fit for someone who is very financially motivated. (Ironically because of the high upfront cost the job tends to attract people from well endowed backgrounds though.)

    I think like in many helping professions we have a majority of very idealistic people who don’t negotiate very well. Employers get away with way too much because refusal at our side at first only ever hurts the patients, so we kinda keep up with it. Maybe something similar is happening in the professions that are in my mind actually the most underpaid for their time, and that’s nursing and care work of all sorts.